Tag Archives: stalkers

blog news, lessons learned, money, overly helpful people, YouTube

Time to say farewell to the Blogger platform?

I’m sitting here thinking about what I’d like to write about today. I originally thought maybe I’d breathe some new life into an old post from 2016. It was about an interaction I had with someone I used to “know”, who regularly gave me grief on the now defunct review site, Epinions.com. Regular followers who knew me on Epinions know that sometimes I write about a man I like to call “Papa Smurf”. I know at least one person, who knows of whom I write, has also co-opted that nickname for him. He’s one of those people who tries to be all wise and act like other people’s “daddy”, and shit…

Papa Smurf is not who I was thinking of writing about this morning…

Instead, I was considering writing about an unpleasant run in I had with …tom… And if you followed me on Epinions, and are still following me today, you almost certainly know who …tom… is. That’s how he signs his “name” on just about everything on which he leaves his mark.

I long ago left …tom… in the dust, mainly because of the annoying interaction we had seven years ago today that prompted today’s memories. That incident wasn’t the last straw, but it was the beginning of the end of my tolerance for his highly obnoxious and unwelcome input. Most of my followers who know …tom…, also know of what I write. A lot of us had the same complaint about his irritating and provocative comments, even though he could be entertaining sometimes.

So this morning, I went to the Blogger platform to have another look at that old post and decide if I wanted to rehash it today. But, before I made it there, I decided to look at my AdSense earnings. I knew I was getting close to the necessary $100 level that would allow me to finally cash out, probably for the last time– ever– on Blogger.

I signed up for AdSense years ago. Back when I was using Blogger for my three blogs, I even got paid somewhat regularly. In order to cash out on Blogger, you have to make at least $100. I think I cashed out a few times during my blog’s “heyday”, which was when we still lived in Stuttgart, and a lot of people were reading about our travels. Some folks had also started reading the main blog, which attracted the most hits out of the three.

The nice thing about AdSense is that users can put all of their blogs on one account. On WordPress, users must have separate ad revenue accounts for each blog. I have already been paid once for the current version of OH, but I will probably die before I get anything for my travel blog. The travel blog hasn’t made ad revenue in a few months. I’m actually thinking about removing ads from it.

If not for a certain meddlesome reader, I’d probably still be posting on Blogger, conveniently getting AdSense revenue on the three blogs. Back in 2019, the Blogger version of my blog went through a crisis of sorts, when we were having trouble with our former landlady. Her ex tenant, a fellow American, brazenly admitted to “monitoring” me, even though she claimed she didn’t enjoy my writing.

I suspect she had enjoyed the blog for awhile, but then started to dislike it when I started to vent about the unfair way ex landlady treated me. I don’t know for certain if the ex landlady is mentally ill, or if we simply had a personality clash. But she was driving me crazy with her entitled, intrusive, and disrespectful attitudes toward Bill and me. She was especially rude and abusive to me. On rare occasions, I would vent about it on my blog. Yes, I now know that was unwise… but then, it never occurred to me that anyone, including the former tenant, would care about such things.

In retrospect, I think the former tenant knew full well that the former landlady is the way she is. She just wanted me to deal with it in silence, because my speaking out about it made it unpleasant and inconvenient for her. I think she flat out lied to us. And instead of just minding her own business and moving on, grateful that she got out of that situation relatively unscathed, she decided to monitor me, and attempted to shame me into being quiet.

It was an especially bizarre form of gaslighting– ex landlady was insisting that Bill and I are awful people who made her life hell by renting her duplex and expecting to actually live peacefully in it. And how dare we expect her to act like a mature businessperson, rather than some warped, dysfunctional version of our mamas?

Former tenant was insisting that ex landlady is always a sweet, fair, and kind woman, and if she was acting like an entitled harridan, it MUST be all because of me. Never mind the fact that she and her husband, themselves, only lasted about 18 months in that house, while Bill and I were there for a little over four years.

Never mind that ex tenant was insisting that I respect her privacy, while she totally shat all over mine, and encouraged an actual smear campaign. And never mind that former tenant, who was trying to make me out as some kind of crazy, mean-spirited, disruptive person, exited life on her own terms last year.

Prior to therapy, I might have kept quiet about the unpleasant and uncomfortable situation we were in, but as a confirmed truth teller, I don’t keep abusers’ secrets anymore. Because of those circumstances and the ensuing small claims lawsuit over the deposit that was predictably and illegally withheld from us, I moved the original OH blog to WordPress, which offers functionality that Blogger doesn’t. Now, I pay to post my blog, and it doesn’t make me any money. But I have a lot more security here than I did there. Moving the blog meant starting over, which was hard for me, since it had taken several years to build a meaningful readership on Blogger. Thankfully, it took a lot less time to get this blog going at full speed.

In the wake of the minor blog stalking incident, I decided to keep my music blog going on Blogger. The music blog had very little personal information about me, and practically none about the situation we were in back in 2019. The other two blogs– this one, and my travel blog– were relaunched on WordPress. Once the situation with the landlady was settled, I made my old travel blog public again, but no one really looks at it. It’s not connected to AdSense. The old original OH blog is still hidden and probably always will be, since there’s some dated, useless stuff on there that doesn’t need to be public.

I told myself that once I hit $100 on Blogger, I’d discontinue the music blog, which is mostly about the campy music I loved when I was a kid. I haven’t updated it since New Year’s Day 2023. Most of the traffic comes from a handful of posts, mostly about Richard Carpenter’s daughter, Mindi.

It’s taken me ages to finally hit the last $100 I needed to cash out. Most of that $100 was made from the original OH blog prior to February 2019, before I moved it to WordPress. So… that means that to get those last painful bucks from Blogger, I had to wait several years, earning pennies from AdSense every month. As you can see from the featured photo, I finally managed to reach that goal today… and it’s exactly $100! How often does THAT happen? I figure it must be a sign.

Now… do I delete Dungeon of the Past, or just leave it up for posterity? I do still get comments on it, but they’re mostly bizarre comments from Carpenters’ fans. There’s one person who has repeatedly posted that Richard Carpenter and his wife, Mary, are biological first cousins. Their official story is that Mary was adopted. I don’t know if she was adopted or not, but I figure it’s none of my business. They’ve had five healthy children together. What difference should it make to me, or anyone else, if they’re biologically related? I occasionally get other comments. Like, I wrote a review of Belinda Carlisle’s book and reposted it on my Dungeon blog. I got a comment from one of her half sisters, which I thought was interesting. I have since moved that post to this blog.

I may decide to move some of the more interesting Dungeon posts over here, and just delete my Blogger account. Life is short, and even though I have lots of time on my hands, that account is just one more thing to keep track of. I don’t think I have any true regular readers there, who eagerly look forward to new posts, though some content continues to attract hits. I’ll take some time to think about it, as Bill and I also decide where to go on vacation, and whether or not to get another dog… and when it should happen.

Lately, I’ve been having some fun on YouTube. I don’t know how long it will last… but it’s fun for me to make videos of songs I want to try. My latest video is actually doing surprisingly well. I think some people get a kick out of women who sing Led Zeppelin songs.

This was fun to do. I just have trouble lining up the video and audio parts.

Music is less controversial… except people like to see singers on camera, and I’m not very comfortable on camera. Still, I’m kind of proud of some of the videos… and they seem to attract a lot fewer idiots. So maybe instead of writing about music, I’ll just make it. I hope at some point, I can write my own song and play it. Baby steps… however, although the friend who encouraged me to record a couple of Zeppelin songs thinks I should dance and wear a boa, I won’t be doing that. I won’t dance. Don’t ask me. 😉

Maybe later I’ll actually write about the post that ultimately led me down this divergent rabbit hole that took me in a totally different direction. Or maybe not. The sun is out today. Noyzi might enjoy a longer walk.

Edited to add: I see that almost a year ago, I wrote about being paid by WordPress for the first time. In April 2022, I had $98 on Blogger. So, you can see, it took me a year to make $2. I hope certain people will remember that the next time they try to accuse me of exploiting anyone for money on this blog. 😉

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true crime, videos, YouTube

I found a new “true crime” time drain on YouTube…

A few days ago, I was watching YouTube, and I noticed that I got a new channel suggestion. I often try to ignore new channel suggestions, because sometimes they turn out to be really lame AI generated videos that aren’t very interesting and basically exist just to generate ad revenue. A lot of channels dedicated to covering reality TV D-list celebrities like the Duggars, for instance, are obviously made by bots. Or, at least they’re narrated by bots, who can’t even properly pronounce names.

I also try to avoid finding new channels, because if they’re good, they turn into obligatory rabbit holes that I fall down and get hooked on. I end up wasting a lot of time watching stuff when I could be doing something more constructive. Or, I end up inadvertently getting sucked into dramas generated by YouTube creators. Like, for instance, this morning, I watched a video by Katie Joy from Without A Crystal Ball that was about how her “stalker”, a British woman named Natalie Kennett, finally got arrested.

Scary stuff!

And Katie Joy’s spawned another video by a different content creator whose channel I discovered a few months ago…

I’m sure there are other videos, too.

If I wanted to, I could spend all day watching this stuff, and while I am definitely a bored housewife with too much time on my hands, I don’t need to spend all day wasting time on this crap. I’ve still got some semblance of a life, right? 😉 On the other hand, I can sympathize with Katie Joy, since I had an issue of my own with a “stalker” (of sorts) a few years ago, who was making offline trouble for me. Some people don’t like content creators, and I’ll admit, I don’t always shy away from controversy. I wish I could be a really pleasant person, like v-logger Katie Wenger of Meet the Wengers, who has a great channel on YouTube. Her videos are almost always upbeat, uplifting, and positive. But I suspect that even Katie has haters, somewhere out there, and I know that I have some, too.

I have seen a lot of people on YouTube posting negative stuff about Katie Joy. I don’t pay attention to most of it, because that drama is not something I want to be involved with, nor do I have an opinion about Katie Joy as a person. I’ve got enough of my own problems, and my own dramas. 😉 Still, it was interesting and scary to hear about how this random woman in Britain has been stalking Katie Joy and causing her some real life, offline issues that even involved the police! Crazy!

The other day, I noticed that I had a new channel suggestion on YouTube, and against my better judgment, I ended up watching the first video… Sure enough, I got hooked. I spent a couple of hours on Wednesday, and most of yesterday afternoon, watching Code Blue Cam, which is a channel that features body cam videos from police officers in La Crosse, Wisconsin. I have to admit, this channel has some very compelling content, and while I wouldn’t have expected it, I’ve actually come away with a very positive impression of the police officers in La Crosse. At least on the videos featured on Code Blue Cam, they’ve all seemed to be kind, easy going, and professional, even treating the most egregiously badly behaved suspects with decency and fairness. Have a look at the videos below to see what I mean.

They’re actually really nice to this girl, even though she’s “absolutely nuts”.
And this officer is actually pretty kind to this lady, even though she was doing 137 MPH. Yes, she was arrested, but the cops were surprisingly polite as they put her in cuffs. In fact, they even seemed concerned about her.
Here’s a lady who clearly has mental health issues and she screams at the cops, calling them filthy names… and yet, they stay calm and collected. They even offer to crack the window down for her.
Cody, in his Garfield sweatshirt, told his girlfriend “I got this, babe” before he totaled his car.

These are just a few of the more entertaining videos I’ve watched on Code Blue Cam. I will warn that they don’t censor the language on these videos, and some of the people who get arrested use filthy words– like, the worst words you can think of, to include the n-bomb, the f-bomb, and the c-bomb. Personally, I don’t mind that they don’t censor, since I think censoring words is a stupid practice. And I mean that for ALL words… especially when we know what the word is, anyway. What’s the point of bleeping? You might as well just let it out, so we all know what was actually said. I’m surprised that YouTube doesn’t bust Code Blue Cam, though, since I notice that Katie Joy and other content creators don’t use certain words. Like, for instance, instead of saying words like rape, porn, or even “stalker”, they’ll use the first letter, or spell it out. What’s the difference? We know what they mean, right? How is it better not to say the word?

Code Blue Cam does occasionally mute what people say, probably for legal reasons, and they do sometimes censor video to prevent getting strikes on YouTube. That makes sense. But, if you choose to watch this channel, be advised that you might hear language that is highly objectionable, or see people doing things that are outrageous. Below are a few videos that show what I mean about that…

Kudos to the cops for not knocking the shit out of this woman. Seriously!
Is she wearing men’s underwear?
And this woman acts like she’s going to put the cops in time out, or something. What the hell? Glad she can count to three, at least.

I’m not a huge fan of cops who act like bullies, but by and large, the police in these videos are very patient and decent. They are a credit to their community. And, honestly, it’s unbelievable what they have to tolerate. People don’t seem to have any respect for anyone anymore.

I don’t know if the videos on Code Blue Cam are representative of all of the police dealings in La Crosse, but I think they are a good public relations tool. It’s nice to see videos that depict police officers acting very professionally. Even when they get to the jail, the cops are decent. Sometimes, they even show up with wheelchairs for the less cooperative folks. Kudos to these cops… and thank God I don’t do police work for a living.

Anyway, it’s a nice Friday today, so I think I’ll end this post and take the boys for a walk… and practice guitar, and read a book… and maybe take a nap. My own YouTube channel got a new video yesterday, which is not controversial or offensive in the least…

Yes, that’s me… and since I was drinking wine, I’m a bit flushed.

Hope everyone has a great weekend… See you tomorrow, unless I get arrested.

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mental health, movies, true crime, TV

Celebrity stalkhers… guys who can’t accept rejection.

Before anyone asks, yes, I meant to type “stalkhers” as opposed to “stalkers”. I was inspired to title this post with the misspelling because I was reminded of a guy I ran into many years ago in a BDSM themed chat room. There were a lot of people in that room who had come up with “clever” names for themselves that also addressed their kinky interests. “Stalkher” was one guy’s nickname. I happened to chat with him briefly, once or twice. I remember him to be an interesting character who liked to be “stern” and shaming when he did BDSM themed “scenes”.

Anyway, none of that is either here nor there. It just made for an interesting anecdote to add to today’s topic of celebrity stalkers. It also gives me a chance to write something provocative. I do enjoy being shocking at times. Perhaps the most shocking thing about that particular BDSM chat room is that aside from being for kinky people, it was really not that kinky. At least not in the main chat room. Most people acted like they were at a virtual cocktail party, or something. I don’t think Stalkher and I were very compatible. He wanted me to wear nipple clamps.

A scene, for those who don’t know, is a role playing fantasy people in the chat room would do. Sometimes the scenes were interesting or exciting. Other times, they got really boring, especially when they involved a certain narcissistic guy who fancied himself an author and repeated the same misogynistic crap over and over again. Most people did their scenes in private rooms, but every once in awhile, people did them publicly, titillating the community. The funniest thing is, most of the people in the chat room weren’t chatting about BDSM.

Yesterday, I happened to watch a movie on YouTube that originally aired on NBC in 1984. It was called Victims for Victims: The Theresa Saldana Story. I actually saw this movie when it originally aired. I remember it distinctly, because I was in seventh grade at the time, and I kept a diary. I wrote about seeing that made for TV film in my diary. I’m not sure why I was so moved by the movie in 1984, since it was pretty typical movie of the week fare that was so common in the 80s. But I do remember being shocked by what happened to Theresa Saldana, which is probably why I decided to watch it again yesterday.

Theresa Saldana, who died of pneumonia in 2016, was an up and coming actress in 1982. The New York transplant, who had been in a few movies and on some television shows, was about 28 years old in 1982. She lived in West Hollywood, California and was married to a man named Fred Feliciano, who worked as a drug and alcohol counselor.

Theresa was attacked by a man from Aberdeen, Scotland named Arthur Richard Jackson. Jackson had seen Theresa Saldana in the films, Defiance and Raging Bull, and he eventually became obsessed with her. He thought the angels had told him to kill her. So he showed up in California, armed with a 5.5 inch hunting knife. On March 15, 1982, he came up behind Theresa as she was about to get into her car, asked her if she was Theresa Saldana, then repeatedly stabbed her in the chest. In total, Jackson savagely knifed Saldana ten times and came very close to killing her. She spent four months recovering in a hospital.

The TV movie about Theresa Saldana. She starred as herself.

Although I’m not sure why Theresa Saldana’s specific story was so riveting to me when I was 12 that I immortalized it in my diary, I did find the movie to be fascinating, mainly because it covered a lot of perspectives. Theresa and Fred eventually divorced, in part, because their marriage could not withstand the terrible stresses caused by Theresa’s stabbing. Theresa was very badly injured, so she was unable to work and had to be hospitalized for months. That put the couple in dire financial straits. Fred was so overcome by the trauma of the stabbing that he soon became ineffective as a counselor and had to quit his job. Meanwhile, Arthur Richard Jackson got all of his needs cared for by taxpayers, as he was incarcerated… or, at least that’s what Theresa complains about as she’s faced with the extremely high costs of recovering from the brutal attack. And those were 80s prices!

Theresa was eventually allowed to stay at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital, which is a facility that serves motion picture and television veterans with limited means. She found the hospital oppressive, due to its many rules and regulations. One of the nurses is a bit of a hardass, which causes Theresa to freak out. But then it turned out that the nurse had also been attacked by a man, so she understood where Theresa was coming from. They became friends, and Theresa eventually started a victim advocacy group which was instrumental in developing anti-stalking legislation.

Notably, it was Saldana’s Victims for Victims group that helped get a 1990 anti-stalking law passed, as well as the 1994 Driver’s Privacy Protection Act. The Driver’s Privacy Act was introduced in 1992, in response to attacks perpetrated on abortion providers. The abortion providers were being attacked and killed by anti-choice activists, who used the Department of Motor Vehicles to get the names and addresses of the providers. Fellow celebrity stalking victim, Rebecca Schaeffer, was also attacked, in part, because in the 1980s, the DMV would provide names and addresses to anyone who paid a fee. Schaeffer’s killer, Robert John Bardo, got Schaeffer’s address from the DMV before he shot her in the chest at close range. I remember Rebecca Schaeffer well, as she was on the show My Sister Sam, which also starred Pam Dawber. I loved that show.

I’m sitting in my bedroom right now, typing this post on my new laptop and watching Dr. Todd Grande. He just so happened to make a video about Rebecca Schaeffer yesterday. That’s why I’m writing about this today. It’s just too weird that I would watch Theresa Saldana’s TV movie yesterday, completely by chance, and Todd Grande would post a video about Rebecca Schaeffer on the same day. Rebecca Schaeffer’s killer was inspired by Saldana’s case.

Weird… this comes up the same day I watched Theresa Saldana’s movie, which I hadn’t seen since it aired in 1984.

After the video on Rebecca Schaeffer was finished, I kept watching Grande’s videos because I was in the middle of a game on my iPad. His next case analysis was about a Mormon guy named Steven Koecher, who had mysteriously disappeared in 2009. I hadn’t heard about that case when it happened, but I do remember the Susan Cox Powell case, which involved a beautiful young Mormon mom who disappeared. Susan’s creepy husband, Joshua Powell, claimed that perhaps Susan ran off with Steven Koecher. Josh Powell, of course, later killed himself and his two sons with Susan Powell, who to my knowledge, still remains missing. There’s no telling if Steven Koecher had anything to do with Susan’s disappearance, but it’s interesting to hear Todd Grande talk about it.

Interesting case, especially since I know a bit about Mormonism myself. Steven was very stereotypically LDS.

According to Dr. Grande, Steven Koecher was going through some tough times just before he died. He was months behind in his rent, had a poorly paid job, and was having trouble finding a relationship. Grande doesn’t discuss this in the video, but Koecher was likely under a lot of pressure due to the LDS culture. Young men are expected to follow a straight and narrow path to include being an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts, going on a church mission, graduating from college, finding well paid work, marrying a nice Mormon woman, and having a family. Like so many young people, Koecher was having trouble connecting all of the dots in a timely and linear fashion. He did apparently have a supportive and loving family who were trying to help him. Koecher didn’t want to accept his family’s help and was wanting to solve his problems on his own. I’m still not sure what happened to Koecher. His case is still a mystery. I’m sure his family is still devastated, as they have been denied closure.

Phew… once again, I’ve managed to tie together a bunch of topics that don’t seem to have that much to do with each other. I just thought it was kind of interesting that I watched an old made for TV movie about a celebrity who was stalked, then by complete chance, watched a newly created YouTube video on Rebecca Schaeffer, who was also stalked and attacked… and then that led to a case about the disappearance of a Mormon. Mormons are, of course, one of my pet topics. Then I throw in a blurb about kinky BDSM chat rooms, which aren’t really all that kinky after all.

I’m not sure what we’ll do today. The weather is nice and my neighbors are annoying me by using some kind of loud electrical power tool. I’m kind of tired… but I hate to waste a day off for Bill. I wish we could have gone somewhere fun this weekend, since there’s a holiday on Monday. I would have been happy just to go to Stuttgart to get a dental cleaning, at long last. But we just never got around to planning anything, even though COVID-19 cases have dropped very low and we’re both vaccinated. Bummer…

Ah well, I guess we’ll figure out something to do. Hopefully, it will be something healthier than sitting around drinking beer. Maybe we’ll get kinky instead.

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musings

Funky residues of strange dreams…

This morning, I was looking through my Facebook memories, and I came across a rather bizarre one. On this day in 2012, I have a very strange dream that I decided to go back to graduate school and earn a third master’s degree. But to get to the town where the school was, we had to drive through an abandoned town that had a bunch of kitschy stuff in it. It looked like it was something out of a horror film.

A former Facebook friend, who was still friends in 2012, wrote that he, too, had a strange dream that night. It involved the late Beatrice Arthur, you know– Dorothy Zbornak on The Golden Girls. This dude dreamt that he’d had sex with her, and she had smeared blue eyeshadow all over her nipples!

I asked him if she was living or dead when they had their encounter. He said she was still living, at which I expressed relief, since sex with a dead Bea Arthur would have been truly odd. I don’t think it occurred to me to ask him if Bea was young or old during their tryst. My guess is that he had sex with the Golden Girls version of Bea, since that was the character he related her to when he’d described his dream to me.

Sexy…

A few years ago, this guy– not someone I knew personally, but someone I “met” on the Recovery from Mormonism messageboard, decided to unfriend a lot of people. He said it was mostly because of his ex wife stalking him and invading his privacy. Apparently, one of his “friends” was a mole, passing along his postings to his ex wife, who then tried to use them in their custody dispute. Because of this violation of trust from a “friend” who turned out to be a stool pigeon, my former friend decided that he could no longer trust most of his social media contacts.

I was one of the people he unfriended, which to be honest, wasn’t that much of a hardship for me. I didn’t know the guy very well, aside from a few conversations we had on social media. He had seemed like a nice person… a proud father of a couple of young boys. Though he was American, he lived in Norway, which was where he’d done a Mormon mission in the 1990s. He’s fluent in Norwegian and was once married to a local, but they later divorced. According to my former Facebook friend, his ex wife is a jealous, petty, vindictive bitch who won’t leave him alone. So that forced him to go “underground” and unfriend people he doesn’t know personally.

I can relate to my old friend’s need to “hide”. I’ve felt that way myself over the past year or so. There are people out there invading my privacy and violating my trust, too, although my situation doesn’t involve minor children or ex spouses, nor do I think I’m in any actual danger. In my case, it’s more of an annoyance than anything else. At the time this guy disassociated with me, I couldn’t relate to his situation. I can, now. I definitely have some empathy.

I haven’t really missed this guy’s presence on my social media… although I think if we were friends today, I would ask him to tell me more about his thoughts regarding Bea Arthur and the blue eye shadow he dreamt was all over her nipples. I love a good discussion about weird dreams. Today’s featured photo even kind of looks like an areola, too.

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