Small Black//"Photojournalist"

And we're back! You may have noticed that NTMO was slightly...not in existence...for the last few weeks. That was because I had gotten an email quite suddenly in the middle of the night telling me that the Blogger robots had noticed an unusual number of links to other sites on this blog, had decided it was a spam blog, and that the blog had been deleted.

That's it.

No "If you think this is a mistake, please contact us", no "If you would like an actual human review of your site, please contact us", nothing. Just "Our system automatically decided this, so THE END." I knew logically that there had to be some sort of recourse or review process, but god damned if Blogger was going to give me the first hint as to a page to visit or a person/address to contact.

There was nothing on the Blogger FAQ about this (other than stating that this is something that is occasionally done - basically exactly what was said in the email they sent me), and sending a message to Blogger's "contact us" link on the site did not get me any response. I thought it was the end, but there was so much else taking my attention at the time that I was willing to just shrug it off, thinking this was fun while it lasted, maybe I should do other things now.

It wasn't until just the other night when I was on my dashboard, saw the link to NTMO under "deleted links" or some such heading, and noticed for the first time a button next to it marked "Restore". I swear, that wasn't there before. I clicked on the button and, lo and behold, got a message saying that an actual human being would now review my blog, and that I would receive a response within a day or two. Sure enough, over the weekend I got the message saying that yes, they had made a mistake, and the blog was back online.

OF COURSE this blog as a number of links to "other sites". 98% of those "other sites" are YouTube. Because THIS IS A VIDEO BLOG. Yeesh.

Anyway, that's how life-support on satellite NTMO was switched back on. And just in the nick of time, as air doesn't really circulate up here in space. You think being on a plane for 13 hours is bad...

But there's nothing like a good near-death experience to force one to take stock. Maybe I can/should do other things with this blog. The videos are not going to stop (unless Blogger tells me again that I need to), but maybe I can no longer assume that the images, beats and melodies tell the whole story, the one that I want to tell. I don't know, still figuring it out in my head. In the meantime, if you don't care, just ignore all the distraction below the band name//"song title" information and keep click-scrolling. Until I find a voice, until I figure it out, just keep enjoying the videos.