Zoom backgrounds : the Penguin Pete 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.

Continue reading “Zoom backgrounds : the Penguin Pete way!”

Our Continuously Evolving Relationship With AI

DISCLAIMER: This was originally posted for another tech blog which has since gone long defunct. It is reposted here with permission.

You can’t deny that we live in exciting times for technology progress. Between IBM’s Watson, Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google’s Assistant (formerly OK Google and Google Now), we are well into the dawn of AI personal assistants which can carry on a minor conversation with you, albeit a limited one resembling a customer service call. Just for some context, here’s what science fiction imagined AI assistants to be like only a few decades ago:

Not only does the Star Trek computer speak in a harsh monotone, but it has wimpy access times too. You’d think a civilization with faster-than-light space travel would have figured out how to cut network latency.

Continue reading “Our Continuously Evolving Relationship With AI”

A Content Marketing Career: Expectations vs Reality

Over at 123ish.com, my satellite client, I’ve been asked to start talking about my own line of work. So I detailed how I accidentally became a content marketer for the web starting from a childhood spent reading books. Then I tackled a detail within content marketing for the web, with the top SEO factors that have nothing to do with the content.

Media changed everything over the last two decades, and it’s still changing everything faster than we can track it. In another century, I might have been a journalist, a historian, a columnist, or a hack scrivener for pulp fiction rags. I kind of regret missing the boat on that last one. But I am in this century, and so I am a content marketer.

That SEO post fits into my grand scheme of blog-rant TED-talks about how everyone overthinks SEO. Expect more to come, because there is no end of delusions about this pursuit.

A Homage to the Typo Fairy

As texting on mobile devices continues to take the world by storm, more and more people are confronted with the complications of using an interface to communicate. And of course, cursing themselves for the mistakes they make.

Is this typed correctly so far? Let’s run a spellcheck: No, the word “texting” hasn’t made it into the dictionary yet, nor has the word “speelcheck” for that matter. Whoops, we mean “spellcheck”. See, now how do we tell the difference between an omission in the dictionary and a fumble on the part of our fat, clumsy fingers? Continue reading “A Homage to the Typo Fairy”

Entertainment you might have missed at Geeky Domain

I’ve been a busy little penguin, inspired by this early spring.

First off, it’s the 100th anniversary of the coining of the word “robot,” in a Czechoslovakian stage play called “Rossum’s Universal Robots” written in 1920, in which robots take over the world.

To mark the anniversary, I pick out the villain AIs from film, gaming, and one Harlan Ellison short story that nobody’s forgetting anytime soon. While I am still rolling my eyes at predictions of AI taking over and shaking my fist at Ray Kurzweil and Peter Thiel for leading doomsday cults, I have to acknowledge that when evil AI is done right in fiction, it makes for an especially chilling villain.

And then…

Continue reading “Entertainment you might have missed at Geeky Domain”

Why Is SEO Marketing For Media Topics So Hard?

Hi, I’m “Penguin” Pete Trbovich… and you overthink SEO!

You have a great idea for a moneymaking website: You’re going to write a fandom blog for your favorite media, be it movies, TV shows, music, video games, books, comics, manga, anime, whatever. And then you’re going to post affiliate links from your site to Amazon, etc., so that fans will read about this stuff and hopefully buy some of it with a commission for you.

What a “passive-income” prospect! All we need is some content marketing, and the rest takes care of itself. People Google for this stuff all the time, so you know it’s a popular topic space.

What fandom do we pick to write about first?

Star Wars is popular, we can cash in on that fandom! Let’s see how competitive writing about Star Wars is:

Continue reading “Why Is SEO Marketing For Media Topics So Hard?”

New at GeekyDomain: Geek Nostalgia

Had a heck of a week over at my GeekyDomain gig.

First there was 80s action figures. All the top action figure franchises launched with their own cartoon, back when toys were cool. I dunno what happened to toys now. Tell me something named “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” would have made it if they came out in the 2010s. Most people never even know that they were originally done as a parody of comic book franchises. To see more of the action figure 80s including the really arcane stuff, see my IMGUR gallery.

But then, as if that weren’t enough geek nostalgia, I noticed that Radio Shack / Tandy post-mortems were all over the web… but they only told half the story. As a Generation Xer, I have a duty to document my unique observation point of view in history, so I made the most definitive retrospective on Radio Shack’s rise and fall you’ll ever see online. With a gallery of Tandy handheld electronic games!

I got around to ramblin’ about the legendary Trash-80 as part of that, so for those of you looking for a broader gallery of computer nostalgia, I also did an IMGUR dump of computing history focusing on the home desktop revolution.

You see, we Gen-Xers are a sparse lot, wedged in between the teeming masses of the Boomers on one end and the Mills on the other. Gen X is the only generation with a point of view bridging the period in between. Historians decades from now are going to be pawing through records trying to find Gen-Xers, who aren’t always marked by their appreciation of prosperity.

The Quest For the Weirdest Kurt Vonnegut Adaptation

The scoop: Over at my long-standing 366WeirdMovies gig, I undertook my own side challenge to figure out the best / weirdest Kurt Vonnegut film adaptation.

So far, the score is settled at Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) as the best, but maybe second-weirdest. A strong case is to be made for the utterly bonkers Slapstick of Another Kind (1982), but it is a terrible movie, almost painful despite its all-star comedy cast. Last and definitely least is Breakfast of Champions (1999), which is not only bad, but damn near a war crime and a deliberate sabotage of Vonnegut’s work by a director with nothing but hatred and ugliness in his heart, Alan Rudolph.

I have seen Mother Night (1996) too, and while it is very good, I didn’t recall it being a contender for weirdness.

Continue reading “The Quest For the Weirdest Kurt Vonnegut Adaptation”

Christmas Gift Shopping With Penguin Pete

So it’s the holiday season and I’ve actually taken a break from my usual Scroogy behavior to go Black Friday shopping last week. This is the first time I’ve ever done that! Normally I stay in, safe from getting trampled. But the kids were in town to visit this last Thanksgiving weekend, and we don’t get to see them that often these days, so I suggested we stampede Historic Valley Junction. And man did we have a blast! Black Friday isn’t as crowded as it used to be.

Of course, I turned it into a client post too. Everybody else runs around Valley Junction taking selfies with everything, so why not join in and be able to monetize it too? That link you will find is also an eccentric gift idea guide.

What didn’t make it into that post: We ate lunch at Heavenly, an Asian restaurant where they know what a bowl of hot ‘n’ sour soup is and set the table with chopsticks in mind first. They have this awesome mural behind the bar there:

mural at Heavenly cuisine in Valley Junction

Continue reading “Christmas Gift Shopping With Penguin Pete”

OK Millennial , Take It From Generation X : You Really DO Suck!

Before You Fall For This “OK Boomer” Nonsense, Read This

Let me ask you information-age savvy Millennials a real stumper: When was the last time you heard a Generation Xer complain? About ANYTHING?

Well, it’s about time you did. I’ve spent my whole life hearing from both Boomers and Millennials, while like a typical Gen Xer I’ve kept my head down and quietly stayed in my lane.

Because I’m a Gen-Xer and I’ll swear on my tattered Breakfast Club ticket stub that I never heard about a generation war until Millennials came along. Before that, generations were just one more arbitrary method of sorting demographics, useful to marketing executives and the occasional political survey, but otherwise unremarkable. I’ll put that up front, even though I’m about to talk about generations as if they meant something: Generations are nothing but what Papa Kurt Vonnegut dismissed as a granfalloon, a word we could stand to bring back for the label-happy modern media.

Continue reading “OK Millennial , Take It From Generation X : You Really DO Suck!”