NYC, The Batmobile, and Thanksgiving

    First, disclaimers to all those who have read Lisa’s thread, parts of which will give her an extra 5 years in Purgatory.

    1. I never fall asleep while driving. I am always alert, awake, and attentive. Although sometimes I have to rest my eyes. Going from 65 to 50 to 70 is just a good way to test your accelerator.

    2. Hearing The Gift while driving inspired me to take a side trip to Philadelphia, but there wasn’t quite enough time. That explains why we spent an hour on I-76 instead of I-80.

    3. It has always been on my wish list to drive for the first time in New York City at rush hour in the dark. My wish was granted. Oh what a perfect day!

    4. I would always treat New York’s finest with the utmost respect. When the officer asked me a question, I had to shout as loud as possible to be heard over all those horns honking behind me.

    5. Susan recently bequeathed to me some of her more colorful vocabulary when she decided she didn’t need it anymore. To show my gratitude, I thought I would use some of it, with enough volume for her to hear it wherever she stayed in New York.

    Now that I’ve made those disclaimers, if I were Pinocchio, my nose would reach from here in Illinois all the way back to Rockefeller Plaza.

    Let me tell you a little bit about the vehicle in which we made our trip. It is a shiny black hatchback which looks like someone took the original Batmobile through a car wash and shrank it, hence the name. Into this car we piled 800 of Tweek’s buttons, 12 pieces of luggage, 3 excited fans, a wheelchair, a breathing machine, (and a partridge in a pear tree?—no, that’s next month). My fellow passengers set some kind of speed record for unloading all of this while double-parked in Manhattan during the above rush hour.

    But that’s not the most important story about the Batmobile. The real story is how I got it.

    Last summer my little dog Sunny died in my lap of heat exhaustion as we were driving home in my old car which no longer had air conditioning. I wrote about it here to express my grief , because you folks here are friends with whom I could share it. Then something incredible happened.

    3 fans from different websites set up another website to raise funds to get me a car with air conditioning. When they had enough pledges, they let me know the money was being sent. It was like an Easter egg hunt, where I would find money in my home mailbox or my post office box or Paypal or my bank. They raised thousands of dollars, enough for me to buy a good used car. I found the Batmobile for sale in Chicago. It had been rebuilt from a car totaled by Illinois police, who have stricter standards than almost any other state. It had to pass 2 safety inspections. It passed the second one with flying colors 2 days before we left for New York.

    And that brings us to the final topic of Thanksgiving. My heart is full of thanks today. I’m thankful not only for those wonderful people who gave me the Batmobile, but also those who, at the same time helped bajaraquel get to the hospital for medical care and helped justfan with his wife’s funeral. I am thankful for the fans who made Lisa’s trip to NYC possible, and those who helped others get there. I am thankful for the more than 100 fans who pledged over $21,000 to help buy this site. And for those whose whose contributions to the site are not financial—those who bring us news and videos, and pictures of Susan. And those who click their thanks to the contributors.

    I feel gratitude for all the many good and generous people on this site. And most of all for Susan, who brought us all together. Happy Thanksgiving!

reprinted from Dyebat's Ride on Susan's Bus

Off soon to NYC

Just a couple of housekeeping details.  lchris has more to post, but is still organizing.  Considering the  volume of data she has to wade through, it may take a bit.  Some of the data that was there a few months ago on the forum has recently "disappeared".  Fortunately, lchris has made backups all along, so the "disappeared" data can be  retrieved, thanks to Hostgator, but it takes time to locate the original and "revised" editions and compare them.

In the meantime, just a reminder. The most recent posts are on top.  You can't make comments below lchris's posts, but you can below mine.  So if you want to comment on either, scroll down to my most recent post, and comment under that.

If any of you are in NYC for Susan's Today Show concert, look me up.  I will have both red & purple scarves.

Begin at the beginning....

This may come as a surprise, but I would like you all to know that the fansite is now up on auction.

Paul Wood (owner) posted this notice on the forum at 1:58PM EST on May 16th 2010. Members were surprised and concerned. What would happen to the site and community they had participated in and contributed to since April 11, 2009?

A discussion of options began and one member named Dyebat proposed an idea. Perhaps the members could put together a bid and run the site as a non-profit venture?

How wonderful, I thought. And so did many others.

But did they know what they are getting into? I knew that they would need some serious technical support. The sites were very labor-intensive.

The members were eager. They deserved it.

They had contributed thousands of videos, and over 250,000 posts in a year! Any mention of Susan Boyle in print or online or on air was reported in the forum. In almost real time. Members from over 120 different countries made sure that all fans were kept informed and up to date on any Susan Boyle news. Members created videos and posters and kept track of global record sales, awards and achievements, video statistics, detailed weekly summaries, and much more. 

I knew it would take a month to get everything transferred, configured, and documented so that Staff could maintain the sites themselves. I had over 20 years of similar experience in doing this. I knew it would be hard. Did I want to volunteer my time for this project?

After all, it's just a pile of code. They could rebuild somewhere else with much less effort. In 2 -3 days. And start fresh.

But, they really cared about this forum. They didn't want another place. They had built a community. With a truly unique, global demographic. There was nothing like it anywhere online.

May 16, 2010 at  7:34PM EST, I posted a message

dyebat, please call me.

That was 6 months ago.

I am still here. We are all, more or less, still here. We have been through a lot together. Some of it joyous and some of it very very painful.

So much has happened.

The emotion I have felt most in the past 6 months is frustration.

What should have been, and could have been, is not.

So many conflicts and so much confusion. We need to communicate more. Talk with each other more.

I have been lied to and lied about for 6 months. So have many others.

This is my story.

It feels quite similar to the story of Alice in Wonderland.  I fell down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world filled with peculiarities.

As Alice said "It would be so nice if something made sense for a change."

Maybe writing it out will help.

Confessions of a DJGer. . .DJG’r. . . djgr. . . Whatever

I realize this title is a bit like Confessions of an Opium Eater in some circles.  For others it’s like revealing oneself to be a member of Opus Dei or the Rosicruceans.   For still others, it’s the equivalent of espousing Satanism. For the real lowdown, keep reading, but don’t expect the DaVinci Code.

Before he had his own website, the person known as DJG put up his own graphic cartoons on another website.  I enjoyed them—Susan Boyle landing her space ship, driving around in her little 3-wheeled car (this was long before the Peugeot) and dousing her tormentors with anti-paparazzi spray. (Edited to Add:  Since the paparazzi now play nice with her, she plays nice with them.)

However, for some obscure (or perhaps non-existent) reason he was banned from that site, and put up his own.  I say non-existent because this may have been one of the early examples of a dementor attack—spreading lies about an innocent person, so others take action against that person. 

Here I will take a short break to explain my use of dementor, for those of you who haven’t heard it before.  In the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, "Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them... Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself...soulless and evil. You will be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life."   

It is a quicker and easier way to describe a cyber-bully/cyber-stalker who torments people across the internet.  It’s far more dangerous than a troll, and it’s MO is different.  A troll pops out from under the virtual bridge, grabs your attention with something nasty, and then runs back under the bridge to hide.  A dementor  slithers through your computer screen, convincing you it’s a friend, then fills you with lies and sets you on a path to hurt others, returning again and again to keep you on that path.  It projects its own evil on to its victims.  I wish it were mythological, but it isn’t.  I and many others have been its victims.

Which leads me back to DJG’s website.  The particular dementor I am familiar with, has specialized in tormenting Susan Boyle fans across the internet, dividing them and turning them against one another.  It has been quite successful in demonizing one particular website, that of DJG.  Why it picked that one, I don’t know, but there it is.  It has convinced hundreds of people that this site is evil, and wants to take over and devour other Susan Boyle fansites, particularly the largest one, susan-boyle.com, and its forum.

Since I’d heard some of these lies repeated by creditable people, I took them for granted.  However in the period while we were discussing collaboration with the administrators and moderators in purchasing susan-boyle.com at auction, it became apparent that rancor between the two sites was going over the top.  Mean posts and PM’s on both sites, fueled by the dementor, were dragged from one to the other.  The level of distrust was incredible.  The staff of susan-boyle.com did not want member ownership of the site for fear that the “DJG’ers”  would seize control and take down the site.  They demanded that we accept no loans from any “DJG’er” lest they renege on the loans and leave us holding the bag.  Once the site was won at auction they were going to “clean out” all the troublemakers/DJG’ers and prevent any more from joining. 

At this point I started getting uncomfortable.  Who WAS a DJG’er?  How did you define them?  Names were named and they did not compute.  Anyone who was “contentious”, that is brought up and defended ideas the admins & mods did not approve, was a DJG’r, even if they weren’t members of his site.  Members of his site who always behaved politely at susan-boyle.com were also DJG’ers.  Finally I asked if DJG’rs were only defined by the staff’s paranoia.  This question was not welcome.  I believe this was the moment when I began to fall from grace.

Webster’s dictionary defines “walpurgisnacht” as

1) the eve of May Day on which witches are held to ride to an appointed rendezvous
2) something (as an event or situation) having a nightmarish quality.

On July 18, 2010, the forum.susan-boyle.com went through its own Walpurgisnacht.  In the eyes of the staff, blinded by the dementor, lchris, Citroen Lady, the infamous DJG’res and myself were the witches riding to an appointed rendezvous.  In our eyes, we faced the second definition. Members were locked out of areas they were previously in.  Others were given access to places they had no permission to enter.  Members and former members had their status changed as banned or unbanned or in purgatory awaiting unbanndment. Member’s names were changed.  Over 100 incidents of unauthorized changes (I was the owner and sure didn’t authorize them) in the control panel and/or database were made and reported to lchris, who spent a 36-hour marathon trying to correct them..

At the same time hateful and outlandish accusations were made against us by staff and members.  Staff abandoned their posts during this time of chaos.  Lchris and I were harassed and insulted by people who as far as we knew, had no reason to hate us.  We were totally bewildered.  WTF was going on?

And who stepped in to help?  The contentious people.  And who stepped in to defend us in the posts?  OMG, the DJG’rs!  People I had fought with in threads in the past!  Friends had become enemies and enemies had become friends. My entire view of Susan Boyle fandom turned inside out that night.  And that was the point at whicht lchris and I realized that something strange was going on.  Ultimately it led to the influence of the dementor.  It felt like it had sucked the soul out of our forum that night.

That was when we turned the focus of our investigation to finding the creature behind this.  That is our priority, in fact our obsession, for the last 4 months.  Eventually we’ll get it.  Then the healing of the rifts in Susan Boyle fandom can begin in earnest.

Finally, back to the title. A while after Walpurgisnacht I got an invitation to rejoin DJG’s forum.  And it has its own name, which I’ll use from now on—The SusaHumor Forum.  So I did. With some trepidation, because I still had some residue of the poison the dementor had spread.  When I got there I found people who were funny, outspoken, intelligent, opinionated, irreverent –just like so many people on the susan-boyle forum.  In fact some of them WERE on the susan-boyle forum, just like I was.

Sure there was anger, and bitterness and suspicion.  I understood that after what lchris and I had been through, and what we’re still going through.  But I think that once we clean off the filth from the dementor, all our different fansites can return to harmony with each other.

Hey now, hey now, Susan, get over here!   We want you to be a channel of our peace!

Sidebar

Since lchris is up to her ears collecting evidence (about which I cannae comment) I will be popping in here more often.  She's the one with all the facts, figures, detailed analysis, and logical conclusions.  I just write what comes to mind.  Both of us are feeling upbeat today with all the good news about Susan breaking records left & right,  So we will be relatively mild.  I'll be back later, and lchris will turn up eventually.

Welcome!

We've set this blog up in 2 parts.  One of these is lchris' section where she'll post "nothing but the facts, Ma'am", and the other part is mine, where you can post comments.

I will be moderating comments, because I don't want to buy any Viagra.  Also, because cyber-bullying is a major problem on the the internet, posts attacking other people, insulting or slandering them, etc. will be deleted. Ideas and opinions are fair game; people are not.  The usual restrictions against obscenity and foul language are in force, because we have to follow Google rules.  Remember, God invented the asterisk, when you feel the need for strong language.  This forum is for adult discussion.  Comments from snotty brats of any age will be thrown out.

Those of you who know me from other sites know I'm an advocate of free speech, but civil free speech. Some of you may be very sensitive to negative comments about your ideas or opinions.  Hopefully this will be a place where you can gradually develop a thicker skin, so you learn that a criticism of your opinion is not necessarily a criticism of you.  Stand up for yourself.

Others of you are experienced debaters.  Be gentle with those who are more fragile, till they get to the point where they're not afraid to speak out.   I've been on the internet for 15 years and so has lchris, and we know discussions can get very heated, where folks say things they would not say in person.  I hope we can prove that freedom and peace are not necessarily incompatible.

Since I am a fan of Susan Boyle, I want her to be treated fairly.  Feedback on her performances,  cd arrangements,  management decisions, etc., whether positive or negative, are acceptable.  Outright insults are not, period.

Of course this is a dictatorship.  Moderated blogs always are.  But I will at least try to make it a benevolent dictatorship.  I'll try to stay out of your discussions as much as possible, unless there's a factual error that needs correcting.  I get my say at the beginning, and then you get yours.

If you haven't been turned off or scared off (or even if you have)  I hope you do feel welcome here.