As undoubtedly most of you have noticed, Voenix Rising has been having a few…issues…over the past couple weeks. Based on the last time this happened, I knew I'd have to get my ISP involved to provide me the necessary information I needed to resolve the issue. (That information was not something I could get myself, so…)

Anyhow, without giving too much away, I applied the fix and all seemed well…until I noticed my scheduled posts were no longer working. Ultimately the solution to that should've been obvious, but thanks to a few WordPress plugins and going down some rabbit holes that led nowwhere, I was able to track the issue down to the changes I'd made to single file on the site after conferring with my ISP.

I'm not saying that this has fixed everything, but at least queued posts are working normally again and the various other errors I was seeing internally have been resolved. Time will tell if the bigger problem that started this whole exercise has gone away or not, but I'm holding out hope.

How do I have nearly 600 items in my Downloads folder?

Prepare to be inundated, boys…

I woke up this morning to this email from my web host:

I thought, "Oh FUCK. I just renewed my hosting a few weeks ago (a month ahead of time), so when does this shit actually go down? I knew my site was huge (I was for some reason remembering 1TB or so.), but did that mean after the hammer falls they would just randomly delete stuff to make it fit within the new size limits?

So I clicked on the link and saw the potential $950 charge for the Pro hosting. Not only no, but HELL no!

Naturally this sent my head spinning the rest of the day. Could I delete a lot of the older stuff? I remembered when I outright deleted everything without a backup and started fresh in 2012—and regretted it for years afterward.

I know I have a lot of inane garbage on this blog, but I'm still attached to it, however silly it is. (And truth be told, even I cringe at a lot of the older stuff I've written, as I'm sure I'll do with my current word salad years from now.)

So the next question was could I find a new adult-content friendly host with unlimited storage and move everything?

The thought of moving hosts is about as enticing as a root canal, but I started googling "unlimited storage and adult content friendly." I came up with a few names. Surprisingly, my current host was not among them….so I may end up having to move Voenix Rising at some point anyway if they ever figure out there are—gasp!—penises on this blog. (Frankly I'm surprised it hasn't happened by now, considering the number of times I've had their techs poking around, trying to figure out why the site errors out so much of late.)

So while getting how-to pages on how to transfer domain names and whatnot, I stumbled across my host's main page and saw the "Pro" hosting advertised for significantly less than what the email link showed me.

I paused for a moment to actually verify the size of all this drivel, and it turns out it was nowhere near 1TB. It was, in fact, only about 45GB. Still over the 40GB limit of my current hosting plan, but certainly not the monster I thought it was.

And that $900 pro plan? That was for three years, and I only renew yearly.

Once I saw that, I realized going Pro (which actually wasn't unlimited, but rather topped out at 100GB…at least for new subscribers) was doable after all—especially since I'd be credited with the year of hosting I just paid in advance for.

Crisis averted. Voenix Rising will continue in its present form and at its present home until such time the issue of penii comes up.

I don't know what's going on with my hosting provider, but it seems every damn day something isn't working. Today I can't upload photos. I can't FTP into the site. I can't tell you how often I've gotten the dreaded Server Error message when attempting to access the site.

And don't even get me started on their tech support…

For that reason, I'll probably be moving hosts this weekend, so there may be a period this weekend when Voenix Rising is legitimately offline.

Twelve hours later, we're back up again. I was pouring over error logs from the hosting site and saw a suspicious "account suspended" script had run two days ago. That wouldn't be the source of the outage, but it got me feeling a bit nervous. I'm paid up with not only hosting but also my domain name through the end of this year, but I stated looking for other adult-content-friendly hosts. Moving everything would be a major pain in the ass, but at least I know it can be done relatively painlessly if needed…

My hosting company is apparently having…issues. Images aren't loading or are timing out. Sometimes the site is completely inaccessible.

This normally resolves on itself after a brief period, but it seems it's hanging on  today like Trump's fantasies of avoiding prison.

I think this is a sign I need to get off my ass and run the errands I need to do today.

I'm going to take a break from this here blog thingie for a while. I don't know if it's going to be a few days or a few weeks or until I get so bored I have to start posting again, but right now I'm just burnt out.

I originally started blogging in 2005 as a way of expressing my frustration at what was happening in the country with the Bush administration. Who could've possibly foreseen the hellscape that was going to manifest slightly more than a decade later, the effects of which we're still wading through.

Obviously I've still used this medium to express my frustration with the direction the country is going, but it seems that every. damn. day. there is some outrage perpetrated by the right that's more horrific than the day before…and I just can't. There aren't enough memes in the world to express what I'm feeling right now.

I still firmly believe that Democracy is going to win in this battle, but it's not going to come through without a few broken bones and a black eye.

And that's all I'm going to say for now.

Of course, watch me turn around and repost something cool I found online tomorrow…

Stay tuned.

I must take a moment in my frenetic posting schedule to extend hearty thanks to all my faithful readers and those from whom I have unabashedly stolen copious amounts of material: SickoRicko, Workmen and Rednecks, Diary of a Fat Slob, Fearsome Beard, Infidel 753, and the countless Tumblr and Reddit accounts from whom I have absconded and sometimes repurposed.

You are all appreciated!

To my Subscribers:

I'm busy re-posting items from the version of Voenix Rising that I deleted prior to moving to Denver via The Wayback Machine, so if you get email notifications of new posts, they aren't actually new…they're just…rediscovered.

Because I've got nothing better to do. Like cataloging my vinyl collection.

I get a lot of referrals from http://andyroo2u.blogspot.com/

I would love to see your blog, but it's by invitation only…

I bought this for one purpose: to liven things up around here at Voenix Rising. I'm going to start posing questions that were provided as food-for-thought in this book. Participation is not required, but it might be fun for y'all to vent anonymously…

Want your own copy? Get one here.

Apologies to any of my readers who have left comments over the past few weeks only to never see them appear. Apparently the WordPress spam filter got a little too excited in its quest for my protection.

I've moved all the comments out of spam that shouldn't have been there and allowed them to post, but if in the future you notice that a comment you left never appears, let me know via email and I will look into it.

That being said, I'll also keep a closer eye on that damn filter!

Always a risk…

*bonus points if you get the reference in the title

I started keeping a Journal in the late 80s, shortly after I moved to San Francisco. (I may have told this story before, so if it sounds familiar, forgive me.) I did this shortly after seeing Prick Up Your Ears, where the protagonist journaled incessantly. It inspired me to document my adventures in The City—both lascivious and otherwise—because I knew at some point memories were going to fade and what better way of pinpointing when events occurred than to have them recorded in real time?

(There are also diskettes hidden away in a wall of one of the apartments I lived in that contain the first few years of that Journal, although I'm sure they'll be unreadable if and when anyone discovers them in the future.)

I kept the Journals up for over twenty years. At one point I had most of them printed out and bound, but I eventually shredded them, keeping only the electronic copies. Little did I realize at the time that the electronic copies would become increasingly difficult to access as file formats evolved. (WordPerfect, anyone?)

I've spent a lot of free time converting these file formats into the 21st Century, although I'm sure at some point they will become as difficult to access as the originals were—a fact I just realized while writing this.

Two things stand out while I've been doing the conversions. The first was how—for lack of a better word—lost I was before my cancer diagnosis forced a much overdue examination of my life. I spent a great deal of time "looking for love in all the wrong places," and while the adventures were certainly fun, they were ultimately unable to fill the need that was driving me into these situations in the first place.

The second thing that stands out is how, despite recording the names and the details of my interactions with the men I dated, there are many—way too many, truth be told—names for whom I cannot conjure a face. Digital photography wasn't a thing like it is today, so even though I was a rather prolific photographer, I often never got photos of the men I was dating.

I bitched about work a lot, although looking back on it now I didn't realize how good I had it at the time. When you work at a small architectural firm with the same four people for nearly a decade, you become like a family—with all the positives and negatives that relationship confers.

My weight was another thing I obsessed over in my writings; something that didn't really disappear from my life until after the cancer diagnosis and I came to simply embrace—and love—my body for what it was.

I stopped Journaling when I got the cancer diagnosis. I didn't want my writing to turn into a pity-party as I was going through treatment (which it easily could have), and frankly, I was getting bored with it. I discovered blogging a couple years later and while it's not quite the same thing as Journaling (especially of late), it's fulfilled that need to express myself—even if it's not as easy to look up when stuff happened since I don't share everything.

Okay, so I dropped the ball on getting my menz all queued up this month. Please stand by, all you horny cock-hounds.