Category Archives: Blog Notes

What discovering a mass murderer’s manifesto can do for your site… (UPDATE)

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My biggest “story” in 2011 (not my favorite, but certainly the “most popular”) was finding Anders Breivik’s 2083 manifesto online and getting it to someone in the media. I haven’t discussed it much, and I wasn’t asked to discuss it except for my pal David Harris for his podcast.And I’m not going to talk about it too much here either. This may be the most boring post I’ve made in a while, in fact, but maybe you’re curious…

Here are the blog posts I made on the subject, in order of appearance:

  1. Anders Behring Breivik | Probable facebook/twitter pages of Oslo bomber/gunner Posted on 
  2. Anders Behring Breivik’s comments with Document.no (Translated) Posted on 
  3. Anders Behring Breivik | 2083 Manifesto and Movie: Real or Not? Posted on 
  4. Anders Behring Breivik | 2083 A European Declaration of Independence | Manifesto Posted on 
  5. Anders Behring Breivik | Is this the e-mail he sent to friends with 2083 Manifesto? Posted on 
  6. STATUS “STATEMENT: It appears that Massimo Introvigne is fabricating and spreading unchecked rumors and making unfounded implications…” Posted on 
  7. An open letter to Massimo Introvigne…. Posted on 
  8. Response from Massimo Introvigne Posted on 

In that last one I state that I’m going to write a blog post on Introvigne’s misinformation and the false linking of Breivik to myself or the Church of Satan. That never happened, mainly because it only seemed to have picked up traction among the lunatic fringe and strange foreign press. This means I may be on some “no fly list” for Botswana or other shithole, but the misinformation would probably have no “real world” effect on me, and any statement made past what I’d already said in the “open letter” would probably be pointless. It ain’t going to convince the kooks, and no serious news source had picked up on it.

So what DID happen?

First, it can bring your website down. This site was offline for many hours after it really hit that I was hosting a found copy of the manifesto.

Very few people came to this site before I had the manifesto up, and then WHAM:

As you can read, this chart is plotting out traffic by week, with a few months before and everything since. It’s still rare that the manifesto posts aren’t some of the top pages viewed in a day, but I actually DO manage to post some interesting things now and again that generate their own traffic.

Here’s a chart less bar-graph, more real numbers:

I actually had taken my website down for a good part of June of this year.

So where the hell was all that traffic coming from? Here’s a snapshot of 7-24-2011:

So, when it was going on, I was curious what people were looking at OTHER than the posts about Breivik. Hell, there were only 102 hits on the “contact” page… I guess after reading my bio on the “about” page, they weren’t so interested in chatting me up.

So, all in all, I’m still getting a lot of residual traffic, but I don’t think it’s actually helped anything else that I do. That wasn’t the goal, and I did my best to not comment on the whole thing and just maintain conservative speculations and stating facts.

So, I was mentioned by name on the New York Times website, there’s a tag of my name on gawker ( http://gawker.com/kevin-slaughter/ ) and I’ve seen how the two phrases “American blogger Kevin Slaughter” and “Kevin Slaughter, priest in the Church of Satan” translates into many different languages  (you see, it depended on if they used Introvigne or a REAL news source to quote from).

 (UPDATE)

Through ALEXA.com I easily scrambled up a bunch of the websites that deep linked directly to the PDF on my website, you know, instead of linking to the blog post itself…

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Secular Blogging / Ingersoll Oratory Contest First Place Video

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I’ve been invited to blog over at Secular Perspectives, a regional blog for “secular humanists, atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, brights and others”. I’m a couple of those, and I’ve submitted my first post the other day. I haven’t decided what kind of stuff I’ll be writing, but keep yer good eye open.

The video for my winning Robert G. Ingersoll speech was uploaded to YouTube this morning. I’m going to start a video page at the top to collect that kind of stuff in one place. Damn my hair looked good that day.

Suzanne Perry wrote the following in November. I think it was supposed to be for print, but I’m not sure. It’s available at the Contest Website.

PRIZES AWARDED IN SECOND ANNUAL ROBERT G. INGERSOLL ORATORY CONTEST
Washington, DC, November 2010 – Kevin Slaughter, of Essex, Md., won first prize in the second annual Robert G. Ingersoll Oratory Contest for his rendition of an Ingersoll lecture about blasphemy, “How the Gods Grow.”
Slaughter, competing for the second time, took top honors at the October event in Washington, D.C.’,s Dupont Circle, which was designed to bring to life the words of the 19th-century orator known as the “Great Agnostic.”
A graphic designer, publisher and sign maker who has emceed burlesque shows and hosts a podcast, Slaughter says he has been an atheist since high school and started reading Ingersoll seriously after hearing about last year’s oratory contest. “In the Venn diagram of things I’m interested in, Ingersoll finds himself at the intersection of my fascination with forgotten/intentionally neglected icons of the early 20th century, lost art forms and entertainments, godlessness and anti-theism,” he says.
Slaughter won $150; a rare original period poster including a color gravure photo of Ingersoll with his grandchildren, a quote from “Love,” and a facsimile signature; and the biography Robert G. Ingersoll: A Life, by Frank Smith.
The contest was sponsored by the Washington Area Secular Humanists (WASH), the Center for Inquiry DC, the American Humanist Association, and the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum as a way to revive interest in Ingersoll–a Civil War veteran, successful lawyer and political speaker who has been neglected by history.
The seven contestants entertained the audience with Ingersoll’s critiques of religion, defense of reason and liberty, and homages to Charles Darwin and Walt Whitman. The contest, held outdoors to draw attention of the public, attracted numerous passersby who stopped to watch, take fliers about the event, or sign up for e-mail notices.
The other winners were:
Second place: Donald Ardell, of St. Petersburg, Fla., a writer, speaker, and blogger on REAL (reason, exuberance, athleticism, and liberty) wellness. Speaking from memory, he presented selections from three Ingersoll works: “A Reply to the Rev. Henry M. Field, D.D.,” “About the Holy Bible,” and a speech at the Lotus Club’s 20th anniversary dinner. He won $100, a mounted photo of Ingersoll and his two granddaughters, and the Smith biography of Ingersoll.
Third Place: Tony Toledo , of Beverly, Mass., a professional storyteller. He presented selections from four Ingersoll works: “Reply to Rev. Drs. Thomas and Lorimer,” “The Ghosts,” “The Gods,” and “What is Religion?” He won $75 and a book, The Best of Robert Ingersoll, by Roger E. Greeley.
Fourth Place: Wendy Shore, of Ashton, Md., a triathlete and academic researcher. She read an excerpt from an Ingersoll letter, “How to Edit a Liberal Paper.” She won $50 and a book, Reason, Tolerance and Christianity: The Ingersoll Debates.

Each contestant also won one of two DVDs: about the Ingersoll museum in Dresden (see http://www.rgimuseum.org) or about D.M. Bennett, founder of Truth Seeker magazine (see http://vimeo.com/10514808 .
The prizes were awarded by a panel of three judges: Margaret Downey, founder of Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia; Tom Flynn, Executive Director of the Council for Secular Humanism and Director of the Ingersoll Birthplace Museum; and Monifa (Mo) Hamilton of Washington, a Distinguished Toastmaster and Lieutenant Governor of the world’s 10th largest Toastmasters District.
Ms. Downey helped to open the event by performing in period costume as Ingersoll’s wife, Eva, known as “a woman without superstition”. Robert and Eva Ingersoll lived in Washington, DC, on Lafayette Square from 1878-1883 and were most surely seen in Dupont Circle.
Steve Lowe, founder of the Ingersoll Oratory Contest, thanks the coordinating committee, judges, sponsors and especially the contestants for their contributions in making one of his favorite Ingersoll sayings come true: “The hands that help are better far than the lips that pray.”
In addition to Steve, the coordinating committee included Lindsay Gemberling, Beth Kingsley, Suzanne Perry, and Jeff Randall.
The other contestants were Joseph Ben-David, of New York City; Craig Howell, of Washington, D.C.; and Steven E. Jones, of Herndon, Va.
For more information about the contest, including videos of the presentations, go to http://www.ingersollcontest.wordpress.com. Write to Ingersoll@wash.com with questions or comments.
–Suzanne Perry

First of the YouTube series: Peter H. Gilmore on Art and Discrimination

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My goal with these is to reuse material I already have in a new venue to try to pull a wider audience for my work, obviously…  I don’t expect the podcast and my books to be wildly popular, but I think there’s a larger audience than what I currently have.

Set up a few photoshop templates for text and images, and change the elements out for each interview subject. Excerpt a 3-5 minute audio segment and then adjust timing of template elements to match the time of the audio. Upload and fill in all the information.

I thought it was necessary for a lead-in and lead-out audio that could stay the same from one video to another to go along with the visuals before and after the . I don’t like that I use the word “excerpt” twice in the audio portion of the lead-in, and “favorite” twice in the lead out. The latter is less annoying than the former. I will probably rerecord the lead-in audio.

KevinISlaughter.com serves as a testing ground for things I may or may not do on the UA site. I install plug-ins, etc. here before using them on UnderworldAmusements.com.

I’m also getting frustrated with Facebook not displaying content in my posts correctly, from the podcast players to flickr photo stuff, but I don’t know if there’s anything I can do about it besides putting notes like “This ___ may not show up properly in some feeds, please view the original post”.