Well, it’s revolution time in America again! What took it so long?
Around the nation, the Black Lives Matter movement has inflamed the nation and swept around the Earth. While I don’t hold out hope that much permanent will be gained, let me go on the record as saying I support it 100%, and Civil Rights for anyone, anywhere, at any time. Pictured in the banner: Graffiti in the Seattle “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” summing up the national attitude right now.
But in the meanwhile, I’m scrambling to select topics in my usual venues that are both on-point for the clients’ interests and relevant to today’s headlines. For instance, did you know that geek culture was founded on Civil Rights activism? From Star Trek to The Munsters to Night of the Living Dead, promotion of equal rights for all races, genders, beliefs, and lifestyles has been at the root of our most cherished institutions of sci-fi and fantasy fiction.
UPDATE: Actor Tim Russ gives his thoughts on what makes Star Trek tick, points out exactly the same parts I do without saying the phrase “Civil Rights.”
We’re back with another update from Penguin Pete, that blur you might have seen sprinting around trying to catch up on all his projects. I’m so busy blogging that I don’t have time to blog about my blogs.
Cannabis Culture – The Fake Cart Wars continue!
First, Sherbinski, a counterfeited real brand with a history so disgusting that this time I’m rooting for the bootleggers. The guy who founded this boutique brand is a clueless, Narcissistic, spoiled infant who insists that he invented the universe with his stupid orange vape cartridge packaging, and teamed up with Post Malone for a promotional deal. Don’t know who Post Malone is? Lucky you. But just imagine if you compiled a worldwide database of every child porn collector and had a computer AI form a composite from all the mugshots. Ready? Here it is:
All of us nerds made zombie apocalypse jokes at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m not so sure we’re joking any more. I’m sure as hell not.
Whenever I have braved the Outside World to forage for supplies lately, I get closer and closer to getting into a fight myself. I grew up in the mean ‘hoods of south L.A. so I’m no stranger to rumbles. I’m not scared for myself, but I had hoped for a more peaceful coast to retirement in a tranquil suburb by now.
You can clearly distinguish Team Human from Team Zombie
Team Human are the people who believe in science and reason. They wear their masks and gloves, use sanitary wipes and disinfectant, and keep their distance. They respect the store employees. All of us are out to go about our business quickly and efficiently with the least amount of drama.
Team Zombie isn’t buying any of that. They don’t wear protective gear, and make it a point to get into everybody’s face around every corner. They’re hostile and confronting. They scoff at our “imaginary” pandemic and vaccines and all of our “so-called” science. They’re out to pick a fight at every opportunity.
Over at 123ish.com, my client has commissioned a series tapping my 20+ years experience in content marketing. I’ve dispensed some hard-won SEO and online marketing wisdom in a steady trickle over there. Here’s a list:
Top SEO Factors BESIDES Keywords – For those website owners who pay all the attention to SEO keywords and no attention to anything else, including whether Google’s crawlers can index the page with all that great content on it in the first place. Yes, I have had to patiently explain to generations of clients that Google needs to FIND the page first, then worry about the keywords.
Amazing New SEO Method Discovered : Write Like A Human Being! – Busting a mass of myths about actual text content in relation to how Google sees and ranks your site. The problem with this field is that 90% of the knowledge about textual SEO you’ll find on the web is either outdated, or was outrageous nonsense in the first place.
The Top SEO Tools For Content Marketing – I just want to point out that I was not compensated nor paid by any of the companies whose software I mention here. Yes, SEMRush is expensive, but it’s such a power-tool that it’s ridiculous not to mention it.
Social Media Optimization – The Other Digital Marketing – Along with SEO, nobody thinks about this other sphere of online content marketing: social media. Yet “influencers” pull down up to seven figures, so there must be something to it, no?
I put these posts up partly for the education of the general public, and partly with a self-serving mission because I’m sick to death of explaining the same thing to client after client over and over and over… This isn’t going to help much, but it’s something.
Of course, watch my own space here as I also post under the category You Overthink SEO, just some addendum thoughts and my snarkier, less marketable thoughts on the matter.
*NOTE*: This isn’t a normal blog post; this is a declaration of war. It is tactical and dirty because it was a dirty fight already before I got here.
Wait, I thought I was done fighting about free and open source software…
Yes, I distinctly remember closing down my old FOSS-focused blog, delivering my final battle report for the Great Linux Desktop Wars, getting one last laugh at the con artists I helped shut down, and moving on. The mobile market gives the read-only users their software, and we makers and doers have our laptops, so everyone’s happy. Android rules the mobile, Linux rules the server and industrial sector, it’s Miller time, right?
Dr. Roy Schestowitz, one of my old comrades in the FOSS wars, gave me a nice send-off in 2013. So yes, I must have properly retired.
Why is this still happening? Well, actually, a new thing is happening.
The Old Thing that was happening: Everybody had nothing but desktops and laptops. Makers and doers, us working folk, needed these tools to make and do stuff, using Linux and command lines and programming. Read-only users, people who do nothing but consume, wanted computers to be dumbed down TV sets for them to drool on, while hunting us geeks down in the streets to brand our foreheads with the scarlet “elitist” and then force everyone to use Microsoft Windows.
(To make a long story short, OK?)
That thing stopped happening because hallelujah, mobile came along and saved us. The read-onlys could have their TV set in their pocket and never cared about our tools again. It’s been a loooooong time since I heard anybody attack a command line.
But here’s the New Thing happening: Now the read-onlys outnumber the makers 9-to-1, and they are in charge. The read-onlys want to dumb down our tools anyway because they want everybody to use mobile like them and can’t see why we need powerful, complicated tools to do stuff. If they can’t get us onto mobile, beside them, so that no work gets done, they want to break the tools we use on laptop so we’re screwed anyway. Out of spite.
Dangerous things happen when you put a read-only in charge of an open source software project, especially when he’s the CEO of the company that owns it, and is – stop me if you’ve heard this before – yet another trust fund baby born into wealth and prestige who spits on people who do work.
Again, I thought this was over. I don’t want to go back in the trenches, I thought everyone had learned that lesson!
This is about WordPress, Gutenberg, and Matt Mullenweg
Get used to those three terms, because you’ll be seeing them a lot around here in the coming months.
Hello! Why, this is my own website! I remember this place! It’s where I come to blog some more after blogging for clients all day. Let me tell you, it’s hilarious to be in content marketing and have your own site be in the depths of Google’s 35th page of search results for anything at all. “Yeah, but my clients’ sites rank high…”
Latest boof THC cart bust: Green Box, a product I traced to a guy in Inland Empire, Cali, who takes vacations to Maui, rents the penthouse suite at Vegas casinos, orders the most gourmet cuisine from the finest restaurants, Instagrams all that, and still can’t afford a license for his bunk ass vape cartridge brand. Dude lives like Scarface before the fall, but it’s a fascinating look into street cart culture. If I turn up mysteriously dead, it was this guy. I love my job.
Second-latest boof THC cart bust: Fiyaman Extracts, which can afford to hire Tommy Chong to endorse them but also – surprise! – can’t afford a license for their black market, heavily-counterfeited product. I love my job.
Drama of the month: When I busted yet another boof cart brand, Gold Coast Clear, the seller showed up in our forum on DabConnection to snivel that our exposure hurt his little business and demanded we take it down. You know, because that’s more important than when 15-year-old kids die from vaping boof. So I got pissed enough to deliver one of those epic irate rants I’m famous for, titled “if we get your brand mistaken for fake, IT’S YOUR OWN DAMN FAULT!” If you read nothing else by me this year, do not miss this.
I’ve been way too busy to address the story when it first broke, but that’s how the burrito’s been rolling around here lately. Briefly, here’s the sequence of the story which made my blood boil:
COVID-19 pandemic hits
World recession (if not depression) hits
An unprecedented number of citizens in US file for unemployment
US government issues economic stimulus checks so the economy doesn’t go boom
IRS, banks, and other institutions report a crisis: they can’t help people fast enough because their machines are using… COBOL!
This triggered an avalanche of ignorant technology story headlines the likes of which haven’t been seen since Y2K.
It’s been going on like this for weeks. The drooling stupidity dripping over these stories is inexcusable in the year 2020. The media, let us never forget, is chock full of stubbornly anti-intellectual reporters who flat out refuse to learn because what’s the money in reporting an accurate story?
So, for those of you just joining us (because everybody else lies to you), allow the World’s Oldest Blogging Hacker to explain this mess…
UPDATE 04/19/20:Readers have uncovered a massive, coordinated asstroturf campaign to spread fake news and rally a denialist uprising about the CoronaVirus. Buzzfeed concurs, noting ties to a special interest group.
See, I told you it was deliberate, not ignorance! Listen to your prophet next time.
The US is currently the most-infected country in the world. At a rate of one thousand people dying per day, we will soon match and surpass the countries where the virus has taken its deadliest toll. Currently that’s Italy, at 15K deaths. The US can catch up to that number by next week at this rate.
In the middle of all this, we still have a shockingly high denial factor.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and leader of the White House CoronaVirus Task Force, has been getting death threats. Merely for doing his job.
We could go on all day of course, but that’s enough examples for now. At this point, either the reader has turned away, or else I’m preaching to the choir. Because reality is politicized. So it’s time we looked at how it got that way.
So Zoom is the latest and hottest thing in teleconferencing apps, and it’s become the official video conferencing interface of the 2020 CoronaVirus pandemic. Isn’t that a cheerful backdrop for your company to get famous?
Lately I see a few people having fun with Zoom backgrounds. There’s the burning house meme which went viral. Others have picked backgrounds from The Office or Star Trek: The Next Generation. I figured I’d join in the fun, because if there’s one thing you all need right now to cope with the epidemic, it’s my deep-fried dark sense of humor.
DISCLAIMER: This post originally appeared in another technology blog that is now defunct. It is reprinted here with permission.
In the year 1969, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie led a team of programmers at Bell Labs to develop the Unix operating system, which was to be a successor to Multics. It proved to be a smashing success in the growing computing field and became the standard for operating systems for the next two decades. In the year 1991, a Finnish programmer name of Linus Torvalds had an itch to develop a Free and Open Source (FOSS) port of Unix, and announced his intentions on Usenet mailing lists leading to a famous debate with one computer science professor Andrew Tanenbaum.
We today know Linux as the root of the Android operating system, dominant in the tablet and smartphone market by as much as 85%. But what many people don’t realize is the huge amount of other attempts that were made to create the perfect Unix-like operating system. Like settlers braving the snow to lead a wagon trail out west, the early days of computing marked many attempts to forge a settlement in the digital wild west, and many met defeat. The players in this epic saga might surprise you.
