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Back for a quick over night up the back blocks of Puotorino.

Bagged a couple of good size spikers from the track…

Last night I was riding on the back of the ute when one jumped up from some thick cover and bolted  in front of the ute, my mate hit the picks and I nearly ended up over the bonnet. I chambered a round and shot it on the run.

Got up early this morning to go to another spot, it’s a bit of an effort and the ute can’t get up there so went early on the 4 wheeler and walked the rest of the way…was pretty quiet…actually like a morgue…so bailed out at lunch time.

We went to pick up my hootchie (yes a real one) that I left up the other track last night and my mate was walking up the track when a hind and a good-sized spiker bolted across in front of him. Well the Spiker dropped, the hind got away.

This is the second time I have been on this land, it is hugely enjoyable…I’ll be going back…and targeting the 12 pointers and above…didn’t have time to get onto those ones this times so just picked off targets of opportunity.

Still at least the freezer will be re-stocked.

I’m having a wee break…

I’m off around the North Island for the next few days.

I have some clay pigeon shooting lined up…picked up a slab of ammo and a box of clays from Zee and Toni at Hamills in Manukau.

I am also planning on dropping a few Reds, i hear they are roaring where I am off to. Hope the weather blows through but it should be good anyway off line for a night or two in the back blocks.

Posting will be lighter over Easter but I should be back refreshed and ready to keep up the pressure on unions, pinkos and other assorted scum…at least until Duck Shooting starts.

If anyone has anything that needs shooting then please let me know. I intend to do heaps more this year now I won’t be doing any silly bike races against lying cripples.

Harvested crops or about to harvest crops that have pigeon or bird problems let me know.

Goats that want shooting, let me know.

So off to pack my .17HMR, .308 and 12ga…that oughta do it for anything I come across.

If anyone wants to submit a Guest Post them email it in, I’ll post it in between filling the freezer.

Open Parachute has the latest blog rankings for March.

Thank you to all my readers and commenters for supporting New Zealand’s number one blog and helping to continue to grow the traffic and readership.

I’m pleased to note that Martyn Bradbury’s little read blog gets about the same number of readers in a month as I get on a good day.

When I first started the Blog I did so under a pseudonym…I did it for a number of reasons. The main one though was that I knew that no matter what I said or did people would say it was my father speaking or that I was doing his bidding. Likewise I used the pseudonym so no one would hold him accountable for what I had to say or did. So when I started blogging it was under the pseudonym Whaleoil.

Eventually I registered a domain name and people then found out who I was and as I predicted the accusations started. To this day whenever there is something that I have said that upset the more sensitive types they suggest that my father put me up to it or that he somehow can control a 43 year old man who lives his own life with a family of his own. It actually says a great deal about their sad little life that they believe the father is the man or the man is the father.

Anyone who knows me and knows my politics knows that Dad and I are seldom in agreement, and haven’t been since I was able to voice an opinion….though I must say he has become more tolerant of my view in recent times.

Anyway I thought I would share that because I read a post about anonymous or at the least pseudonymous blogging:

There’s something freeing, to be sure, about being able to say anything you want. You can engage in unfounded name-calling, or intentionally hurt someone’s feelings, or just generally behave like a twelve year old. And no one will know it’s you. And that’s why I don’t read many blogs that are written by people who prefer to remain anonymous or who write under pseudonyms when there isn’t really any reason for them to do so. In fact, I don’t think there are any blogs I read on a daily basis whose authors are anonymous. The anonymous or pseudonymous blogs are often just filled with cruelty, name-calling, and bad arguments. Indeed, there are a great many people who choose to write under an assumed name because they want to harrass or offend others.

I thought about that…and realised that the answer to the complaint that many in the left wing have about myself and David Farrar being int he media a great deal commenting is that we are in the media precisely because we are known, and we are prepared to wear our beliefs and opinions publicly. An anonymous blogger can hardly appear int he media. It is perhaps the single biggest reason that there is so few commenters fromt he left appearing, mostly because they are anonymous cowards.

Which leads into the argument for anonymous and pseudonymous blogging:

We’ve created a space where you can actually think and be different, be free of the norms, hierarchies and prohibitions of the “real” world, and be able to imagine alternative horizons of possibility. If you would really be willing to undo all of that just to prevent people from calling each other names on a comment board, you should really take a look at your priorities.

Which of course is complete bollocks. This is the exact reasoning behind the majority of the Labour and Union flunkies at The Standard remaining anonymous. They believe their anonymity means they create better writing. It is a specious argument and one that largely leads to their blogs becoming echo chambers.

I believe that if more of them “came out” that there would be a better more honest, reasoned, political discourse in the NZ blogosphere.

↬ Andrew Sullivan

Often I sit at night reading blog after blog, news site after news night wondering just what I am going to post for my reader tomorrow. Sometimes it is almost impossible to see the twist, the thing that makes my readers come back. Other times it is easy. Sometimes inspiration hits the inbox, other times the feed reader

The more tired I am the harder it is…the less sleep I have had the harder it is, but there is always the nagging voice there that I need to find things my readers like. I need to post more, or better or faster, but always improving the reader experience. Blogging for me is a learning journey, it is finding out what people like and what they don;t and posting what I like too…but sometimes it is just bloody hard work…

And then there is a kind of synchronicity that happens, when you read a post or watch a video and it just clicks and there is a blog post. This video is one of those moments, and it is relevant to this post and these ideas.

Regular readers may have noticed some little symbols appearing in posts (ᔥ and ↬) and a slight change in the way I attribute stories or posts.

In blogging there are two basic ways of attributing where ideas of quotes, or indeed whole posts come from.

Until now it was done with words, like ‘via’ or ‘hat tip’

Not only is it polite to acknowledge sources, something the mainstream media is terrible at doing it also shows where you get your influences from and allows the source information to be scrutinized allowing better discussion of issues or topics.

At The Curator’s Code they explain the ethos of linking:

One of the most magical things about the Internet is that it’s a whimsical rabbit hole of discovery – we start somewhere familiar and click our way to a wonderland of curiosity and fascination we never knew existed. What makes this contagion of semi-serendipity possible is an intricate ecosystem of “link love” – a via-chain of attribution that allows us to discover new sources through those we already know and trust.

While we have systems in place for literary citation, image attribution, and scientific reference, we don’t yet have a system that codifies the attribution of discovery in curation as a currency of the information economy, a system that treats discovery as the creative labor that it is.

This is what The Curator’s Code is – a suggested system for honoring the creative and intellectual labor of information discovery by making attribution consistent and codified, celebrating authors and creators, and also respecting those who discover and amplify their work. It’s an effort to make the rabbit hole open, fair, and ever-alluring. This not about policing the Internet from a place of top-down authority, it’s about encouraging respect and kindness among the community.

I read about this and have decided to implement it. Sometimes I may leave it out, but that is more out of laziness than wilful disobedience to the code.

Consider this a part of the ever changing world of Whale Oil Beef Hooked as I seek to continually improve, innovate and stay in front in the blogosphere in NZ.

ᔥ Andrew Sullivan

Once again I am receiving emails from loyal readers who are sick of rubbish comments from trolls.

Andrew Sullivan, who doesn’t have comments, comments:

Dan O’Connor blasts what blog comment sections have become:

It is time, I think, for us to accept that disabling or deleting idiot comments is no more anti-democratic or elitist than refusing to engage with a person harrassing you on the street. Just because everyone is allowed to have their say, it does not follow that the bilge they say is worth listening to. I love the internet. I love social media. And the only way we will save them from themselves is by accepting that, more often than not, comments are rubbish.

Gawker is implementing a new comment system to deal with the problem. Recent Dish on a wildly successful comment section here. We’re sticking with posting the best and most informative of your emails. For the Dish, reader input plays a key role in airing debates and discovering facts from readers with deep knowledge of the subjects at hand. There is a way, in other words, to create a web space where readers add and don’t detract from the experience.

It’s called editing.

My own preference is to have a free reign with comments, but smack down outrageously racist, misogynistic or hateful comments. I have a firm belief that my “army’ will deal with any silliness. I don’t want a heavily moderated and sanitised comments section like Red Alert. I enjoy comments from Kosh now he is well trained, less so from Phil who seems untrainable and still posts tl;dr comments.

Personal unfounded attacks on me are dealt with swiftly and permanently with no recourse.

However I think that Dan O’Connor as quoted above does have a valid point.

Is it time for me to start doing this too, or do I need some volunteer moderators to deal with the more foolish of trolls?

Cactus Kate is a good friend….she was one of the few, very few people who stuck with me through my dark times. Those of your who have suffered or still suffer depression know that one of the things you unerringly do when suffering is burn off friends…you can count the ones remaining on the finger of one hand…Cactus KAte is one of those friends.

I know that she will die in a ditch for me, and she knows that I will die in a ditch for her.

Yesterday Martyn Bradbury used a silly and petulant post of Duncan Garner to get up me.

Cactus Kate is not amused:

Martyn has posted recently many pieces solely about Whaleoil. It has become obsessive because Whaleoil is not even bothering commenting back to this taunting. His last “effort” yesterday about Whaleoil, mental illness and in particular suicide was particularly disgusting. I bet Martyn now tries to say he was only joking. Well fuck you pinhead, it is not funny to talk about suicide about anyone like that. That fight was between Whaleoil and Duncan Garner who said his piece like the hot head he is, I imagine to regret it later because he is an adult earning a six figure income. This was absolutely no business of Martyn’s or anyone else’s but once again Martyn had a spot of Whale envy and had to stoop to getting a “me too” in. So he can cop a serve from me.

Whaleoil has progressed since I have known him to be a picture of health since his dark days of depression of a couple of years ago. He has never ever talked of suicide which is something I have the most respect of him for. And even when he was at his worst, depressed and on crippling zombie like doses of medication prescribed by insane Doctors, barely capable of getting out of bed when his ever supportive wife would ask him to try, he would still hand Martyn his arse in every debate they have ever had.

A depressed and over-medicated Whale still was better than a supposed fully-fit Martyn.

Heh, loving the smackdown, it conitnues and she isn’t pleased that he has used inept slurs against her:

The worst part of Martyn’s performances from my perspective is that he can’t even insult me properly, which is highly disrespectful in itself. He hasn’t got the eloquence or command in his writing that Dim Post possesses to do it well and in a clever way. The only thing that would ever cause me distress would be to accuse me of being a pinko and the Libertarianz have that covered.

Martyn calls me a “failed ACT candidate“. Like it is an insult that I chose not to be on their Party list.

Think about this for a minute folks. Even Dim Post would find this moronic as an insult and mock it mercilessly as an effort.

If this really was a failure and you could choose one thing in the past decade to fail at then failing to stand as an ACT candidate in 2011 would be right up there in things that you should be proud of achieving.

Her final message for Martyn Bradbury:

Martyn, you are a silly, juvenile uncommercial pillock. If you want a reason you don’t have a TV show that rates over a couple of hundred viewers look no further than yourself then look to your competition Pagani, McCarten and Trotter and the respect that others show them on your side and their opponents, my side.

Theirs is a gentlemanly decency, intellect, charm and class that I am afraid you will never possess in your endless quest to be invited into the mainstream media. Sad.

Thank you Cactus.

I’m on Larry William’s show The Huddle on NewstalkZb.

On with me is Deborah Coddington.

Our topics are:

• Talking about the port worker who’s talking to the media now upset that I found out the other side to his story!
• Also talking Otago Rugby union possible bail out by the council.
• And last but not least, talking about a sex offenders register – with the release of a pervert from jail in Dunedin.

As is usual I will post the audio tomorrow. You can listen live online at their website.