So you might have noticed that this blog lay dormant from about Thanksgiving 2020 through mid-January 2021. That’s typical; I’m too busy at that time of year working for other people’s sites, and then when the holidays come, I want to hibernate, not blog some more.
But now that I’m back to work and reasonably assured that the nation isn’t going to fall…
… I can toddle back to my standard shtick. Over December, I blabbered about a lot of video games, so there’s much to recap!
See, my freelance career revolves around content creation for the web. And a lot of my clients run ads on their site, either as their main revenue or just a sidecar profit stream. A bunch of them also advertise themselves. Generally speaking, I get to work with ad-based content a lot, either taking or giving.
What a lot of people don’t realize is how many kinds of restricted content there are in the world of online advertising. Most ad networks are highly conservative about the kinds of ads they will run. Since we’ve all seen some questionable ads, it makes you wonder about the kind they turn down.
Prohibitions against alcohol, tobacco, and firearms are a given, as well as adult / mature content, content harmful to minors, hate speech, etc. You’ll be happy to know that most major ad networks ban illegal and fraudulent content. These make sense, but there’s others that you’d never think of.
One of my gigs is the cannabis industry, for example, which cannot advertise through regular networks, full stop. Companies that make not just cannabis products, but even accessories, have to turn to specialized ad networks and affiliate programs that cater to their niche. While I was pitching in for the research on that post (I’m also chief site editor there), I came across some of the restrictions, and they remind me of the old “wacky laws” lists that used to post around the old web.
So here we go…
Continue reading “You Can’t Say That In a Digital Ad Anymore”
Straight to the point: I care about the environment. I care about climate change. I believe in science.
Do you people also care about the environment? Good, then we are on the same page. We should be friends. But we are not. You are all going to hate me because I’m about to tell you something you don’t like to hear, but you need to hear.
This makes me angry, nay, fist-clenching furious. Can everybody understand this concept, or have I lost you naive little blueberries already? You can have good intentions, and still do bad things because your method is wrong. Try to sit down and allow that thought to penetrate for a minute before you go on.
Continue reading “Penguin Pete’s Patented Environmentalism Rant”
I am here today to speak on behalf of all keyboard hacks everywhere. From the lowest SEO rat off Fiverr to the most successful content marketing guru. Every single one of us is sick of flowery writing gig ads.
Let me save you time: If you really want to attract top talent that will actually work for you, the golden ad formula is this:
This should be easy stuff. You sell something to somebody and now you want a content marketer, don’t you? One of the biggest things that will make us freelance writers skip your ad is if you sound like you have no clue as to any of the above points.
But in the first, most essential place, please spare us these sugary funeral eulogies like this one somebody pitched at me on Linked-In. This is not to reflect on the company. This is just an education in what writers actually think about when they read your ad.
Continue reading “How To Make Freelance Writers Barf With Just One Job Listing”
You could say the same for every day of the cursed year of 2020, but my timeline seems to have been particularly dark since reviewing – and being bit by – Cultist Simulator. It was indeed a fit spooky choice for October, which dragged me through the month as I’ve tried to keep up my horror viewing in the middle of everything else.
At my stoner DabConnection gig, we’ve become the freelance police of the cannabis industry busting fake brands of THC vape cartridges left and right. But this time I got interested in a real brand managed by an Instagram influencer Dan Bilzerian, though “real” and “managed” are both up for debate. The brand has raised millions in investor funding and squandered millions more with Bilzerian apparently going through the most hysterical public midlife-crisis ever. We’re talking $50 million in 2019 alone!
Continue reading “Now My Other Gigs Are Infected With Occult Influence”
In H.P. Lovecraft’s America, Halloween seems almost redundant, but we can all try our best to get in the festive spirit anyway. Between the cults and the plague, any horror movie you watch this time of year seems downright sunny by comparison. And now most of our leadership exists in a Red-Wedding-cliffhanger twilight of infection. I told you guys, zombie apocalypse.
I got the game off Steam for an early birthday present for myself, in keeping with the spirit of an Autumn person. I haven’t been able to put it down since! This led to my writing up a review / guide / journey through Cultist Simulator at my GeekyDomain gig – not once, not twice, but in three parts.
Continue reading “Might as Well Start October With a Zombie President”
As a freelance blogger, what I really do for a living is just explore. That’s it; I visit some exotic far-off realm of the anthropocene noosphere, and I report back on what I found. I always find something weird and squirmy, without even digging much.
My favorite thing to do in the world is to open the door on closet cultures most of you never knew existed, and drag them out in the daylight. Even though I snark a lot, I love these pocket societies because they present an alternative view of the world. We all have our own perspective on “where it’s at.” Where is it at? That depends on whom you ask. Maybe the lost tribes are right. Maybe the underground subcultures are right. Maybe we should all ditch everything and go find enlightenment in some hidden digital playground because that’s all the meaning we have left to get out of life. Maybe we’re all deluding ourselves. Maybe we have no choice, and our only relevant decision is to pick the delusion that allows the most comfort.
One of my clients, 123ish.com, is an international platform which has been gracefully accepting some of my most maddened rants over the years. Sadly, they do not have a way to link to an author’s page using their set-up. So from here on out, I will maintain this specific blog post and link it from this site’s front page, serving as a pseudo-directory to my work over there.
Links to all my 123ish.com posts in chronological order (bottom = newest) after the jump:
As the United States witnessed firsthand in the 2016 election, technology is now as good as the prime mover in US politics. From the flap over Clinton’s emails to Trump’s impulsive Twitter rants in the wee hours of the night, and from the Facebook ecology of political posts in the months leading up to November 8th, 2016, to the self-organizing flash mobs of protesters and rioters that emerged after the fact, that election was shaped by electronic communication more than any election before it.
We’ve become more aware of that in the past four years, but it was creeping up on us then.
Which raises a very pertinent question: Just how much is high-tech media going to shape the world? Will we become a race of hyper-sentient empaths? Are we all merging into a hivemind?
When anybody in the world can transmit any amount of information to anybody else in the world in a split second, all barriers have been lifted. There’s really no practical difference between the average person now and an omniscient being, at least as far as an ancient Biblical author would have conceived it. Each of us carries in our pocket a device granting us powers that, one hundred years ago, would have been seen as nigh on godly.
But that’s the trouble with a planet full of omniscient gods: They become a royal pain to boss around. Yet we need to regulate this space now, right now!
Greetings, energy beings of planet Gaia! I have ingested large quantities of an exotic plant from the Far East which gave me new, mutant powers of bullshit detection and a renewed faith in our one true god Zardoz. It doesn’t matter how interesting your week has been, mine has been more interesting.
At the behest of my client at DabConnection.com, I experimented with this Thai herbal drug making the rounds at convenience store kiosks. Read my bummer trip report on kratom here, where I risk bodily soundness and my sanity in trying to get any reaction out of this rip-off product, including gulping down mugs of kratom tea on an empty stomach at 5AM because that’s the thing you do on an average weekend morning! Alas, I got nothing but dead air for the trouble, which included gulping down so many of the half-gram pills that I rattle when I jump up and down.
I love my career.
I found out confirmed proof that alleged “kratom strains” all come from the same plant, too. My suspicion that the alleged “kratom plant” is actually catnip can neither be confirmed nor denied by my cat, who recognizes catnip but will not touch the stuff.
If I offer him catnip, he’ll sniff it once and give me a dirty eye, insulted that I would disrespect him with this offering, before pointedly batting it away. I have a Mormon cat.
