The talented and wonderful people at my web hosting site, www.monkeybrains.net, have a Webalyzer service running that lets me look at the numbers of hits and visits that arrive at the various pages that I maintain on the web—mostly blog posts, but with a few book-title-specific pages as well.

And today I thought I’d run a list of my top twelve most popular links, in descending order of popularity. During the month of March, 2014, so far, these twelve top links have garnered traffic ranging from 140 thousand visits for the top link down to a thousand visits for the twelfth link, with the middle-ranking links in the 10 thousand visits range.

For some unknown reason, the image shown above is my most popular. It’s my painting “Fractal Skate Posse,” from 2010, and it’s in the collection of my awesome ski/skate/surf-photographer nephew Embry Rucker III.

And now we’ll move into the list. It would be logical if I illustrated each link with an image from the linked-to page. But fun trumps logic. And I have a backlog of new and old photos here. So, as I so often do, I’m going to illustrate this post with completely random unrelated photos having no obvious connection with the links.

[Amazing rainbow spotted off our porch this week.]

(1) “Anselm Hollo 1934-2013”

This is the link that gets over 140 thousand visits a month. No idea why. It’s a fond reminiscence of my dear departed Finnish-born poet friend, Anselm Hollo, with excerpts of a couple of his wonderful poems.

[I like the cryptic signs on phone poles.]

(2) “In Her Room. My BETTER WORLDS Art Book.”

This one features my online art book about my paintings.

[An Alice In Wonderland style talking flower seen in Oxford where Lewis Carrol taught.]

(3) “The Free PDF Version of Rucker’s SOFTWARE ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER GAMES”

I’m guessing that people in Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Third World are using this page, which features a complete PDF of a computer science textbook that I wrote about programming videogames. I doubt if anyone is using the particular game framework that I designed, but the book has some good info about other software engineering and programming topics as well.

[ Jellyfish warning glyphs. Dig the pain zigzags coming off the distressed stickperson’s legs. And the jellies are like brains with dangling spines.]

(4) “The Free CC Version of Rucker’s WARE TETRALOGY”

I’m really glad that I released the WARE TETRALOGY as a free CC book. It sells fine as a commercial ebook anyway. But having it be free means that it’s in some sense immortal. People will always be able to find it. And it’s fitting to have my core cyberpunk series be out there on the web on its own.

[Always good to see a snake. Sinuous.]

(5) “COMPLETE STORIES by Rudy Rucker, as a Free Webpage”

Easy to see why this link is popular, as it’s a giant web page with all of short stories on it. As with the Ware novels, I do releases like this to keep my work alive.

[A 1930s junker car in a guy’s yard in Pinedale, Wyoming. Crumb’s Mr. Natural had a car like this.]

(6) “Visit to Manhattan”

I love shooting photos in NYC. So much to see.

[ Puddles on our porch. Hail, nature, perfect in every part!]

(7) “Beauty in Chaos”

Learning to see chaos in the natural world is a valuable skill. It makes life more interesting.

[Really dig the new lamps in our library. And the high window of sky. ]

(8) “Golden Gate Bridge, Futurism, & the SF Biz”

Spending a night near the GG bridge, on the Marin side of the bay. I was a paid speaker at a futurism con. Great gig.

[Another spot I’ve photographed many times. Always trying to see it new. Carrying a camera helps. It’s like I get into a conversation with the camera. “You see that?” ]

(9) “The Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton”

The Lick is an amazing, other-worldly spot near San Jose, definitely worth a visit. But no way would I ever ride my bicycle up there, as people nowadays like to do.

[Love the annual Jiffy Mart freestyle bicycle-flippers at the Los Gatos Xmas parade. So anachronsitically unsafe.]

(10) “Dave Eggers, THE CIRCLE. Gengen SF.”

The Eggers novel strikes me as an important event relative to our understanding of what the web is doing to our heads. I use the word “gengen” to refer to the ever-increasing wave of SF-genre books which are successfully marketed as general audience books.

[Get a wideangle lens, turn it at an angle, and a home becomes a weightless space station!]

(11) “My Dive Log, 1995-2009”

I love the alien-worlds, zero-gravity sensations of scuba diving. Getting almost too old to do it anymore. My records thus far.

[ Greg Gibson and me near Los Gatos, at the time I was starting to write my novel SAUCER WISDOM. Greg is in the persona of my UFO-abductee character Frank Shook.]

(12) “Four Dimensional Portals To Other Worlds”

I’m forever seeking a magic door to another world. That’s why I write SF.

I finished a new painting, “Hawaii,” (doing one last touch-up on March 14, 2014, which is the image shown here.) It has three big plants and three petroglyphs, although the guy on the right is perhaps morphing into something more.

“Hawaii” oil on canvas, March, 2014, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

This painting has to do with an experience I had about seven years ago, and which I’m currently trying to fashion into an SF story. For the rest of this post, I’ll just edit some of the relevant passages from my 1997 journals. And, following my usual fashion, the photos will have nothing to do with the subject matter at all.

[Photo taken from the air near Salt Lake City in winter. I call this one, “A New Map of the World.”]

So in August, 1997, my wife Sylvia and I spent a few days at a somewhat generic resort hotel on the big island of Hawaii. The place was called something like the Royal Wak. With its parking-lots, golf-club, and shops, it formed a asphalt island atop a desert of black a’a lava stones.

Among the local sights in Hawaii are the petroglyph markings.

[Paul Mavrides with his black velvet painting of the Challenger disaster.]

Stones bearing petroglyphs are viewed as sacred, but I noticed that the Royal Wak hotel developers had broken up some of them to decorate the little shops around the hotel. Sad broken glyph frags sitting in, like, the flower bed of a Benetton, with educational labels by the glyphs.

I was cuprous about petroglyphs, and I found a little book that talked the glyphs being in places where there is a lot of power, or mana. One big spot is in a lava field near the volcano Mauna Loa. Another was near out hotel, a spot called Puako.

[Greyhound Rock, north of Santa Cruz, CA.]

We went and saw the Puako petroglyphs two times. They’re in a field of smooth pahoehoe lava, which has cracks, making a background pattern like the plates of a turtle shell. The petroglyphs show men, animals, spirits. Many of them are drawn with their heads towards Mauna Kea, the highest peak on the island.

It’s hypothesized that the men etched onto the rock are perhaps projections of the artists, like shadows. I imagined the early Hawaiians of 1300 AD jumping up in the air, looking at their shadows, then drawing that kind of design.

[Rudy at a Pixies concert in San Jose, February, 2014. Hat knit by Georgia Rucker.]

The Puako petroglyph field is in a spooky place, overgrown with introduced exotic kiawe or mesquite thorn trees. In the old days, it was blank lava here, like the slopes of Mauna Loa. So much mana there that it’s a little scary.

There was a menacing warning note at the bottom of the sign at the petroglyph field: “Those who defile or mistreat the petroglyphs must bear the emotional, physical and spiritual consequences for those and those around them—we can take no responsibility for these effects.”

Somewhat foolishly ignoring this, I walked onto the petroglyphs with my shoes off—in my socks—to get a better photo. Immediately I felt like I was trespassing, that I had intruded.

[Anxious tourist, who appeared in an early draft of the “Hawaii” painting. Sylvia’s advice on this detail: “One word, Rudy. Palette-knife.” But I documented him before I scraped him off. He reminds me a little Bill Burroughs in the Amazon jungle, or rather, of a fellow-traveler whom Bill would have made fun of.]

A bit later, dizzy from the August sun, we lost our way and forked off onto a false path in the woods. The criss-crossing shadows of the kiawe branches seemed petroglyph men all over the ground, twisting at odd extra-dimensional angles like A Square coming up out of Flatland, and threatening, nay pursuing me, intent on extracting a terrible vengeance for my defilement of their field.

Back in the room, I heard a knock on my hotel-room door. I peered out through the peephole. A petroglyph is in the hallway—an intense stick-figure of a man, like figure made of glowing fluorescent-light tubes. I didn’t open the door.

[Rudy with old college room mate Kenneth Turan, now the famed film critic of L.A. Times and NPR. Great to see him up in San Jose this month. Photo by Patricia Williams.]

I did a two-tank scuba beach dive near Puako the next morning. It was good. There was an eel garden at a drop-off to the continental shelf. There were about a hundred eels, silvery green, each with its tail tucked into the smooth white sand, and its body floating erect, wobbling this way and that. A few eels were swimming around free, adjusting their position. They had long slit mouths partly open. Behind them was a huge, huge form slowly moving, a leviathan of the deeps. An extraterrestrial

I felt a sense of mystery, of vastness, a sense enhanced by incipient nitrogen narcosis. The guide and taken me a little too deep.

[Natural Bridges in Santa Cruz.]

After the dives I talked to my guide about the petroglyph who was stalking me. He asked, “Is it all the petroglyphs that are after you, or just one of them in particular? Maybe you can get a second petroglyph to help you deal with the first one. Maybe the first one was from a burial site. And the helper-petroglyph might be a turtle.”

“Where would I find a turtle petroglyph to help me?”

“There’s a lot of petroglyphs by the good fishing spots. Meet me this evening and I’ll show you. I go spearfishing near hear at night. The fish are asleep and you can dive and just pick them up. It’s like a supermarket.”

And then? Wait for the finished story…if I manage to write it.

[“Grandpa’s Birthday,” oil, 24 ” x 20 “, March, 2013. Note 67 candles, some on cake, some on strawberries.]

And, by the way, tomorrow, March 22, 2014, is my 68th birthday! I’m happy to have made it this far. It’s been interesting the whole way.

So, yeah, I enjoyed the rain and now it’s spring.

Love this bank with the exposed root. All the unknown underlying aspects of the world.

Went out to the beach one foggy morn with daughter Georgia, her husband, and their two darling children. The piles of washed up kelp amaze me, so beautifully crafted, for free, discarded, Nature’s bounty.

Awesome heap of seals beside the Santa Cruz dock these days. They wriggle over each other, and “nobody” gets that worked up. Some barking for show, some teeth-baring, but very rarely an actual bite.

Gotta dig that neon Stagnaro’s fish sign. Certain things belong in neon, and one of them is the icon of a fish.

My neighbor Gunnar turned eighty last week and one of the other neighbors gave him a party.

Exciting to go over before hand and see the colored lanterns, and then it was dark and the lanterns were in full play. Party lights.

Markings on cracked asphalt are always an easy photo. Add in a bird and you’re got a composition.

We saw a newt up on a Los Gatos hill, not sure if s/he had slept in this hole or was just hiding in it. Newts, the way they wriggle, always remind me of the way Deadheads dance, repetitively raising the arms and legs.

As for me, I’ve been working on some Transreal Books productions, preparing some of my backlist books for re-release. Editing, proofing, designing. I’ll talk more about this in a few weeks when I launch a new Kickstarter to fund the new editions.

I’ve got a birthday of my own coming up, and I can only hope to emulate the example of the eighty-year-old Gunnar, shown here getting funky and way way down.