Tag: rants

From the Trenches of #2022 : Your War Blogger

Good morning, and how are all my cosmic blueberries? Here, if you need a mood fix, there’s a gallery of hippie New Age good vibes I threw together on an old IMGUR post.

Sorry for not catching up more, but things have been busy. Blah blah blah, Pete doesn’t blog enough, blah blah, I don’t have time to boost my own site because I’m too busy boosting my clients’ sites.

I’ve also been hypnotized by the endless Doomscrolling feed of world news like the rest of you. Ukraine Putin Russia COVID climate change. Bad news all around. I’ve been telling you all it would get this bad years ago.

I Predicted Everything!

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how much of the year 2022 I prophesied, years and years ago. I’ve been tracing this line between Trump and Putin since Sally Yates got fired – yes, remember her, New Years’ Eve, 2017?

Trump-fires-Yates

Oh, I am sure that we are all shocked at Vladimir’s Putin’s INSANE and senseless massacre of Ukraine, as well as his own soldiers, citizens, economy, etc. But, boys and girls, I have been following this yellow brick road a long ol’ time. Won’t you join me on my adventures?

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Announcing the First 366 Weird Movies Video Reviews

Howdy gremlins and goblins! Just a minute while I talk to some old people:

(This domain goes back to 2006, and I still get fanmail from my old material, so I know some old-timers have followed on. You folks know that my longest-continuous blogging gig is 366WeirdMovies. So if you know my review history, you must be on pins and needles wondering which film I selected for the very first video review. (Actually I know you all are wondering, I’m just stalling for the suspense.)

Anyway, for the rest of you: Hey kids I video-reviewed an old horror movie! It’s 1974’s Legacy of Satan, a movie not quite weird enough to be honored on The List, but worth an eyeball that seeks out weirdness. Made in partnership with some colleagues of mine from there, Giles Edwards and Greg Smalley.

But let me back up a bit here while the piano player warms up the lounge for me, because the story of how this project came together is gonna blow the training wheels right off your unicycle…

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Dear Service Industry : Have You Tried Just Not Being Such Huge Assholes?

Is there a new wind blowing through Capitalism? One can only hope so!

There’s this great big Bolshevik revolution going on, if you hear pop media tell it, where all the low-paid service workers are scurrying away from their greasy deep-fried enslavement to give the McFinger to McJobs. Ostensibly it’s merely about the low pay, but I’m writing this to point out that other factors don’t help the situation.

Leftycartoons

But yes, the media hype has it that “We All Quit!” It’s just “take this job and shove it,” all day every day. In the background, there’s a political war going on (when isn’t there?) to raise the minimum wage. Of course, the true story here is not that there is a “labor shortage” like these retail slave pits claim, but rather a wage shortage.

Trotsky_worker_shortage

OK, employers, the ball is in your court. You’ll have to do better than $7.25 an hour, a figure set nearly a generation ago. But in the meantime, while you fondle your change purse and wonder how you’re going to pay for all this, may I suggest an appeasement measure to your disgruntled workforce, which is also a cost-practical solution?

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Crazy Times Don’t Last, But Crazy People Do

Greetings and the usual introduction about how the current news cycle is as nutty as squirrel poop. However, there is light at the end of this tunnel. I see signs of meager improvement. The year 2021 is so far being nicer to us than 2020. Let’s get to brass tacks and bras tax:

If you follow my Twitter feed, I also broadcast my latest work there occasionally. Lately at the geeky fandom beat, I got sick and tired of The Matrix getting a free pass with all the crazy conspiracy theories it’s spawned. If we’re going after the toxic media that poisons our minds, let us include the popular ones. We openly laugh at the spastic static of Marjorie Taylor Greene, but wrap the same bullshit in a leather trenchcoat with cool guns and we literally make a religion out of it.

And nothing appears to be as popular as The Matrix. Between Red Piller Incels and people murdering their parents because they thought they were living in a computer simulation, The Matrix is responsible for indoctrinating people to a level similar to The Turner Diaries. Yet social media does not allow you to criticize The Matrix! The Wachowski siblings are sacred, untouchable cows. You get stoned to death by angry mobs for daring to suggest that they don’t walk on water.

UPDATE: As usual, after I finish my thesis, I find a video with a reasoned scientific argument agreeing with me!

Using the same logic, we could say “there are more ants than people on Earth, therefore the odds are better that we are ants.”

I like that! Let’s insert a jump here before my front page gets overloaded.

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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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Greatest Hit : Why Would You Want To Do That?

The below is a post from November 6th, 2011. NINE YEARS AGO AS OF THIS POSTING. It was posted on my old open source blog and got popular enough to get passed around most of the very news sites I talked about in there. Much water has gone under the bridge since then.

I STILL want Dillo! I just gave up and use Lynx for that function now. I couldn’t get Dillo to even compile on a modern system without maintaining it myself. There are thousands of journalists out there that struggle with this same problem every day; they need to get the facts, and all the facts are behind either paywalls or a million popups and autoplaying videos. I wish we just had a blogger’s equivalent of a Press Pass.

I also no longer run any of the below Linux distros. I’m on the Mint bandwagon now. It’s been the default “works out of the box” Linux distro for a few years, but God knows what I’ll have to resort to if Mint gronks.

Anyway, I’m reposting this NINE YEAR OLD post because people loved it and linked to it. Do not be surprised if it is out of date, because it is an old post. Got that?

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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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My 123ish Posts : An Updated Link List

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:

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Gen Z Parents : Help Us, You’re Our Only Hope!

The editorial powers that be asked me to throw together a resource for parents facing “back to school” in the post-COVID-19 world. This is a post on home-schooling and remote education resources for parents raising mostly K-12 kids. It’s not much, but it’s what little I can do.

Parents should take education into their own hands, even before COVID-19

Even though we sent our kids through public school, we homeschooled them as if they weren’t attending. That’s because the public school system in the US is so gutted, so hostile to intelligence, such a Babylon of pseudo-learning idolatry, that I have to wonder if it does more harm than good.

MAPS_highest_paid_public_professions_US

I dunno, it’s like US schools had some other focus besides learning. I can’t quite put my finger on it though. It’s on the tip of my tongue.

life_support_for_football

Maybe I’ll recall what it is…

In case you missed it (because who even checks by this dead blog to begin with?), I also covered freelance writing in a post-COVID-19 world. So there, you have your school covered and your work covered, all off-grid. Call us when we get a government that’s interested in doing anything for people again.

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I See Nobody Calling Me Elitist For Advocating Science Now

UPDATE 3/7/21: The proverbial picture worth a thousand words:

UPDATE: Dr. Fauci just said everything you’re about to read here in a vastly different number of words and more diplomatically, FSM bless his soul. He did that on CNN in an interview, 8/5/2020, but it’s a reiteration of what he says in this article. He remarks that anti-science sentiments are just “for reasons that sometimes are inconceivable and not understandable.”

Likewise, his family continues to get death threats merely to pressure this brave man into shutting up. That’s a point where I can express some solidarity with his situation, having confronted the exact same phenomenon for the exact same reasons when I started blogging.

Now on with the original post…

None of you reading today will have much reason to believe this. Indeed, most of the evidence is washed away from the Internet now. But I was once one of the most hated figures on the web. That was because, in the early 2000s, I was one of the few people advocating for science literacy via computing literacy.

Nobody wanted to listen then. Don’t Make Me Think was a bestseller. Command lines and hacker tools were held up as something holding people back, something to be avoided, in books like The Design of Everyday Things. Nick Bostrum proposed that we might be living in a computer simulation, and the entire Internet instantly agreed that this was ironclad fact, brooking no argument. Ray Kurzweil wrote book after book about how Artificial Intelligence would make computers “wake up” any day now, and the Singularity would be nigh. Matrixism was treated like a real religion by people who could not tell Wachowski brothers’ movies from reality.

Yes, all of that happened in the 2000s!

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