Tag: global market

I For One Welcome Our Visigoth Overlords

You can’t deny that 2021 is shaping up to be a different year from 2020. We have the same ol’ virus, but we threw out everything else we can get our hands on. The smell of revolution is in the air, and it smells like a new generation wrestling the wealth away from the old, and new culture bumping off the old guard. Finally.

At request of my handlers at 123ish.com, I plunged again into the Gamestop stock short raid and modern Bitcoin millionaires, and pointed out that this, at last, is the proverbial sacking of Rome writ in modern times and the movement of wealth from dusty old guys in suits to bright young kids who approach investing the way they do a World of Warcraft raid.

WallStreetWoW

Speaking of Bitcoin, JWZ, one of my old-skool-hacker idols, has lately become the Al Gore of cryptocurrency mining, yelling that we’re heating the Earth with our greed and we’re all doomed, doomed, DOOMED! He has headlines like “Bitcoin mine cargo container literally incinerating planet,” and more on his dunning-krugerrands tag.

Meanwhile I follow Satan on Twitter (don’t ask, it’s a long story), and come to find out Hell has its own cryptocurrency now. Because of course it does.

I think Satan and JWZ should meet, and possibly have a no-holds-barred brawl in the DNA Lounge for the destiny of this planet. Wouldn’t that be exciting, boys and girls?

Want to see what other cultural rat-traps I have been poking my battered nose into lately? Right this way…

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Quality SEO Backlinks : The Only Trick That Actually Works

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

This time, I want you to take protective measures. Wear a hockey mask and catcher’s mitt, or at least have a pillow handy. This is because I’m about to tell you an SEO trick that is so BLINDING obvious and yet nobody ever, ever thinks of it.

Backlinks, backlinks, backlinks, everybody wants backlinks! To quote Moz.com: “Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO because they represent a ‘vote of confidence’ from one site to another.” But they just talk about how important quality backlinks are, not how to get them. Many sites out there pay lip service to this concept, but are vague on how to get backlinks.

I will not be vague. I will be very specific. This blog post is over 2K words long, relax.

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All You Need Is Drugs

Along with my other geeky pursuits, I’ve waddled along in this whole legalized cannabis industry thing. Mind you – you can take it or leave it, God sees my heart – all this time I’ve been blogging cannabis without so much as smoking a single puff of the stuff. I’ve tried a couple CBD vapes and experimented with kratom, that’s it.

Yes, I have partaken of the ganja plant in the past. Yes, I enjoy it, it is very nice. But weed to me is like ketchup; I don’t need ketchup every week to remember what it tastes like. My attitude towards drugs, like my attitudes towards everything else, is different from most and of course, pisses off both prohibitionists and righteous stoners alike.

Anyway, the cannabis news beat has been fraught with peril and wonder. I even mean the “peril” part literally; there is still an unsolved mass shooting at an Aguanga, Riverside County, California, cannabis farm which has yet to produce a lead. Seven people died and nobody cares because they were all undocumented pot farmers at a bootleg facility. The police just shrug.

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You Can’t Say That In a Digital Ad Anymore

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…

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Penguin Pete’s Patented Environmentalism Rant

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.

wrong-way-environmentalism

You’ve been going about environmentalism the wrong way!

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.

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How To Make Freelance Writers Barf With Just One Job Listing

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:

Hiring-Writers

How Your “Help Wanted” Ad For A Writer Should Look:

  • PAY – MENTION! THIS! FIRST!
  • Schedule – Being as flexible as possible helps us cram your project into that five-hour gap in our week.
  • Topic – WHAT will I be writing? If there’s more to it than just writing, mention duties i.e. editing, social media management, WordPress plug-in slingin’, etc.
  • Company – WHAT is your business model? What is your mission statement? Essentially, how is my writing supposed to make you money?
  • Target audience – WHOM will I be writing for? Are they old fuddie-duddies who still own black-and-white TVs? Are they young hip teens? Working-class moms? Entrepreneurs?

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.

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In Which I Explore More Hidden Worlds

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.

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The Invisible Nation

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?

group-hive-think

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!

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I Am Now A Documented Nunsploitation Watcher

Cthulhu give me strength, my review of Satanico Pandemonium : La Sexorcista (1975) is now live over at my 366WeirdMovies gig. There’s no taking it back now. What’s worse, I actually half-liked it. It’s got great locations and cinematography, and moves at a brisk enough clip that the batty plot will fly right by you without too much grief.

Oh, and here’s a film still that didn’t make the review’s cut:

Satanico_Pandemonium slasher nun

My clients get a little squeamish about posting borderline images, but here in the gutter on my own site I put on no airs of propriety. You’re already reading a post with “Nunsploitation” in the title; it’s a little late to pretend you have standards now.

Of course, I’ve been up to a lot more film-related devilment lately…

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Fingerprint Readers : History’s Oldest Biometric

Disclaimer: This post originally appeared on a tech blog. It is reused with permission.

In the world of technology, biometric identification has been slowly creeping from the world of science fiction to fact. On the most far-fetched front, we have iris scanners, predicted by movies such as Minority Report. On the less fantastic front, voice recognition systems have become a more common technology, though we’re still working out the kinks. Facial recognition is also getting good enough to prompt Jamie Zawinski into being fascinated by “dazzle” methods to defeat facial scanning. But the most reliable form of biometric identification has actually been the fingerprint reader.

Scotland_yard-fingerprint

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