Sunday Ramblings – Big Brother All-Stars To Begin and More

For the last few years, I have been emerging from my winter cocoon in January to blog about Celebrity Big Brother. This is usually when I’m notified that the domain name bigbrotherjunkies.com has expired and I need to renew it before I lose it. Fortunately, they give a 30 day grace period after it expires to renew.  Last year I set it to ‘auto-renew’ so I wouldn’t even need to worry about that again.

Well, with the Celebrity Big Brother not airing this year and the coronavirus capturing my attention since late January, I remained in hibernation a little longer than normal.  When I finally woke up to start getting things prepped for Big Brother 22, I noticed something weird. My site looked a tad different. I tried to log in but nothing worked. “I’ve been hacked,” I thought and began to panic. It turns out, it was much, much worse than that.  What actually happened is the payment method I use to buy domain names (PayPal auto pulled from my checking) didn’t work with auto-renew.  After a little digging, I noticed that the domain was no longer even in my account!  It expired, the grace period ended, and someone snatched the domain up seconds after it became available to the public.

After going through a really rough 24-48h mental stretch, I began to do some digging and found out that it wasn’t a competitor or even a fan. It was someone from Ukraine who bought it on auction because it was a popular domain. They did, however, steal a copy of the site that was still in cache and uploaded all that as their own. My very own posts. Hundreds of thousands of words written over the span of 9 years. All uploaded to my former domain in an attempt to just steal the traffic.

It was quite a rough time, but I should have known that 2020 was going to be a really terrible year when January started out that way. An even longer story short, I ended up finding out who bought the domain, contacted them via email, and was basically extorted an amount of money I am not happy to admit to in order to buy my own domain back.

Why am I telling you this? I have no idea. I guess it’s because as I lay on my living room floor coming to accept that I lost all that work, and watching the coronavirus continue to shut things down left and right, I seriously thought I’d never be able to blog about the show again. You all almost came back to this site only to see some Ukrainian dude try to pretend he knew what he was talking about because he actually had plans to try and keep the site going.

But, here we are. August 2nd and we’re just a few days away from arguably the most important TV season in modern history from starting, and only a handful of people even know for certain who will be on it.

And I know what you’re saying, ‘hold back the hyperbole a bit. The most important season?’, but think about it. Other than maybe some small tight news studios, this is the first real show since the coronavirus began that will try to re-start normally.  The NHL, NBA, and MLB have all re-started this last week, but those are sporting events and so far, it’s been a really rough start for leagues like MLB.

Whenever people describe Big Brother, they say this is the ‘perfect’ show for coronavirus. A bunch of people isolated from the world who should completely avoid the virus.  If this show doesn’t work, it’ll destroy the confidence in the industry and quite possibly shelve a lot of other shows for a lot longer than they were expecting.

Does it mean other shows will instantly ramp up production? No. It just means there is a ton of pressure on CBS to get this right because it’ll probably result in a lot of well-paid actors ‘opting out’ if their shows decide to re-start. Look at the NFL. More and more players are opting out daily after seeing the mess that is going on in the MLB.

Alright, that’s enough rambling today!

Regarding the site, you may notice features come and go. If they disappear, it’ll likely be because I noticed performance issues and I’m trying to isolate the feature. Seeing people online (for example) is a great feature but not at the expense of slowing things down. Speed will always be the #1 priority here.

Thanks for the read!