…salted lithium.

Dandelions on the side of the highway on an overcast day; May 08, 2008
– Photo by Me.

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So the question is, why do we allow people searching for “five ways to kill a man edwin brock anal” to read our intimate thoughts? I’ve allowed people using search engines to find my blog for over a year and it has begun to feel as though I am selling my pain for blog stats.

This isn’t a new revelation. It’s something I’ve been thinking about off and on since I started Salted. But the stats I’m getting from these Google People are mostly based on people not finding what they were looking for. These people find my blog by accident, read the first paragraph of a post about my life, probably steal my photo then piss off somewhere else to find their “miss fran romper room” fetish. At some point, on my part, there’s an erosion of respect… respect for myself, respect for my blog and respect for the people I’m writing about.

I think at various points over the past eighteen months I convinced myself there was a possibility someone searching for answers might find some on my blog. But for every person finding Salted randomly and leaving a message saying something I’ve written has helped them, there have been thousands of people searching for inanities and insane things and finding posts I’ve written about my brothers, my sisters and my mother.

When there’s just the slightest bit of reward it’s amazing how quickly we can forget ourselves. When I started Salted in November of 2006, it was as a recovery tool. But I didn’t start using it as a tool until much later.

Over the first four months I only wrote thirteen posts, and they were about my trying to define the problem, the disease. Then I took March and April off. The essays I was writing during that period were not immediately personal, so having strangers access them wasn’t such a big deal.

But recently WordPress introduced a new feature called “Possibly Related Posts” where random links to WordPress blogs show up on our posts based on similarities in Tags and Categories. And a link to a post I wrote about my little brother’s experiences on September 11, 2001, showed up on a gardening blog… and it freaked me out.

I wrote two news pieces about the feature, I even wrote the owner of WordPress. And as I was doing so I was looking at my blog stats thinking… how can I get so pissed off at WordPress while justifying having people read the same post after they’ve searched for “your tube my little brother is gay”?

It actually comes down to choice… WordPress surprised everyone with their new feature, but I chose to allow people searching for porn to access my life. And, really, I did it for no other reason than the blog stats.

So that’s why I’ve decided to utilize the privacy feature WordPress provides and make Salted invisible to search engines. It generally takes a few days to take effect, so I expect my blog stats to be cut by 60% by the weekend. Oh well. Salted has never been a big-stat kind of blog anyway…

I’m definitely not doing this to prevent people from reading Salted, in fact feel free to pass along the URL or write it on the bathroom wall if you think it might help someone, I just want to get back some control over my blog.

…there’s just a high level of ludicrousness in having people who can’t find pornography on the Internet without resorting to typing “fucking my aunt” into a search engine reading about my recovery.

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So I’ve made the appropriate clicks, and at some point this week search engines will be blocked from the posts on Salted Lithium. This will Not effect people using bookmarks, or typing the URL and it shouldn’t have an effect on RSS Feeds. It will only effect searches using search engines.

Today I received six hits from people searching “504 gateway time-out”, so I will no longer be a resource for people looking for “504 gateway time-out”… or “bible stories/drugs”, or “best baklava places in montreal”, or “bipolar porn”.

If you feel like your RSS feed or viewer is being effected let me know and I’ll see if I can change something.

I’m still trying to decide whether I’m going to be using Categories or Tags anymore. I’ve been told the deGoogleing process can take a few days… so, in the meantime…

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The four pre-release TV trailers for Grand Theft Auto IV
2,3 and 4 are freaking near orgasmic so… careful.

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First, Grand Theft Auto IV is a video game like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now are movies. Weekend At Bernie’s was a movie. The Sims is a video game. GTA IV is an epic achievement in storytelling.

Previous versions of GTA have made half-hearted parodies of cities like Los Santos for Los Angeles and San Fierro for San Francisco, and Liberty City for New York. But this version of Liberty City feels like New York. When you’re ripping a car door open, kicking some civilian in the ballsack and throwing them to the street so you can steal their car, it feels like you’re doing it in New York.

A fan video set to Click Click Boom! by Saliva
Let me know if the YouTube isn’t available.

There are comedy clubs with hours of known comics, like Ricky Gervais, doing standup. There are hours of TV programs you can watch, all done using the same animation as the game. In GTA IV you’re not limited in your choices, when you get a prostitute into your car you have the options of receiving a handjob, fellatio or “Cowgirl Position sex”… none of which I’ve tried yet, but I’ve just started.

There’s even a cellphone which you can use to call other characters in the game, or with an ethernet connection, you can call Other Players on Other Consoles. Which means I can be speeding down a sidewalk in a Humvee on my machine, you can be driving down a boardwalk in a classic muscle car on your machine, and we can chat.

Within the game you can visit an Internet Cafe where you can visit more than 100 websites…

Even cooler is the decisions you make (ie: do I kill this person or let them go?) have an effect on the game. Within the missions everything you do as a player effects something down the line. That’s how open this game is…

Then there’s the choice of the “hero” of GTA IV…

In GTA III the main character never spoke. In GTA: San Andreas the main character, and really the entire story, was a parody of gang life in Los Angeles.

In GTA IV, however, Niko Bellic is a Serbian veteran of the Yugoslavian civil war. He has been working as a merchant mariner for ten years trying to work out the things he did in the war, and has come to New York/Liberty City to find someone who betrayed him during the war…

It’s an eighty-hour long movie where you’re in charge of the decisions and how it turns out… which, from what I remember, is exactly what videogame developers were promising ten years ago.

And the gameplay itself is just about perfect. I’m just past the initial tutorial stage where the computer teaches you the things you’ll need later on. I’m still having some problems with cycling through targets with the guns, and there’s so much to learn in terms of what the character can do… but I’m willing to keep playing until I figure it all out.

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Everyday between four and eight people find this blog by typing a variation of Salted Lithium into a search engine, this is just to let those people know that at the end of this week, May 8, this blog will no longer be available to search engines. So… bookmark it or lose me forever.

I’m not sure what this will do to the people who have subscribed to Salted, I’m pretty sure every thing will be fine, but if there are any problems just let me know and I’ll do my best to figure something out.

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I bought Grand Th3ft Auto Four today… uhm… yeah. So… I’ll be back later.

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