Tag: trivia

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…

Continue reading “You Can’t Say That In a Digital Ad Anymore”

Surviving the Iowa Derecho 2020

The good news is that your humble freelance hack blogger has the household power and Internet restored. That was nuts! The derecho storm marched right through the middle of Iowa, and I have to say in retrospect I’d rather have ten tornadoes than another derecho.

So I’m obligated to blog the experience both for a first-person historical account and to explain to my freelance clients why I vanished for two days. Pictures here are from the news, not mine.

What it’s like after a derecho and city-wide blackout

In the first place, most of the destruction occurred in the late morning hours of Monday, August 10th 2020. It just hit with a force like a shock wave. Trees flying immediately.

Iowa_Derecho_damage_1

The power blinked off within minutes, and we could guess why. What we didn’t know is that this time, the storm’s effects were widespread. Our Internet router was of course knocked out too, but our land line phone remained functional. We hopped onto mobile, but discovered that our local mobile coverage was also spotty.

Meanwhile, the entire city was in chaos!

Continue reading “Surviving the Iowa Derecho 2020”

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

Continue reading “Fingerprint Readers : History’s Oldest Biometric”

A big damn update on everything I’ve been working on

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 love my job even more.

Continue reading “A big damn update on everything I’ve been working on”

An Affectionate Look Back at the Sinclair ZX Spectrum

DISCLAIMER: This is an old post from my previous geeky technology blog. It is reposted here for hysterical raisins (it was popular at the time).

People from about Generation X or so today cut their milk teeth on these classic platforms, and today they’ll be all too ready to shake their cane at you and tell you about how it was in the good old days. Their memories of their first BASIC program or first addictive game are tied in with their first love and first beer. Amiga, Apple ][, NeXTSTEP, and the ZX Sinclair still have their cult following going strong today. But it is the ZX Sinclair Spectrum that is particularly remarkable, and foreign to the rest of the English-speaking world.

Continue reading “An Affectionate Look Back at the Sinclair ZX Spectrum”

A Look Back at the History Behind the Firefox Web Browser

Today, Chrome is the web browser that dominates the online market, by virtue of being the home browser for Android, which dominates the mobile market. Hooray. #AnyoneButMicrosoft.

But before that, the web’s browser was Firefox, which is still pretty solid on the desktop. Firefox is the progeny of Mozilla, and the story of Mozilla’s most successful product, the Firefox web browser, goes even further back into the history of the web itself. Interestingly, Firefox’s lineage brings it surprisingly close to other web browsers that it competed with – especially the web browser with a big, blue ‘e’ for its logo…

Continue reading “A Look Back at the History Behind the Firefox Web Browser”

New at 123ish: Unique Desktop Toys For Office Fun

I don’t miss much about the corporate 9-to-5 (cubicle slave #X197532), but one thing I do get nostalgic for is all the dumb things people would do to amuse themselves to alleviate office tedium. I did a whole review of unique recommendations for office desktop toys. These are all non-electronic diversions too, so you can rest your bloodshot eyes from glowing screens too.

The pic is, of course, from Terry Gilliam’s epic 1985 film Brazil. Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) twiddles with this decision toy with ‘yes’ on one side and ‘no’ on the other, with a weight that drops onto a wedge to randomly fall on either side. It’s a perfect metaphor for the movie’s dystopian universe, where everybody endures only having the illusion of free will. It’s where, for all the good anything does you, you might as well go through life making random decisions.

Always wanted to find this toy in real life, but probably not looking in the right place. In the meantime, check out my recommended list, you’ll find many surprises!

 

New at Spookwire: Five Horror Movies Inspired By True Events

I’m sure my steady readers will be familiar with my taste for horror movies. My latest shingle is hung over at Spookwire, a site dedicated to the paranormal and eerie events of all kinds.

Join us this time for 5 Terrifying Horror Movies Inspired By True Events! You were expecting the Winchester Mystery House or the Dyatlov Pass Incident… but what is Freddy Kruger doing there?

Click on for bonus buck content…

Continue reading “New at Spookwire: Five Horror Movies Inspired By True Events”

My IMGUR image essay on a peculiar sci-fi trope went viral

I couldn’t help but notice a trend as I explored the covers of pulp genre media. In sci-fi, horror, and speculative fiction in general, there’s one damsel-in-distress pose that’s almost guaranteed to show up. It’s rampant on comic books and pulp fiction novels, and shows up in TV and film spanning from the earliest decades to the most recent.

I’m talking, of course, about women in glass tubes. And once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere, until you have to wonder if there’s a global conspiracy to encase females in crystal cylinders. Many golden age sci-fi rags did it; some did it up to three times in their print run. Video media has done it from the original run of The Outer Limits to the film The Hunger Games. It was even performed as a science experiment at a world’s fair! Women in glass tubes, nicknamed “tube girls,” just fill the genre to the point where you never find the end of it.

Continue reading “My IMGUR image essay on a peculiar sci-fi trope went viral”

New 123ish Post: The International ECommerce Guide To American Holidays

Every year during the holidays, when dealing with clients from all over the world and having to explain to my fifth Australian what Thanksgiving is and why my whole family’s visiting for it, I vow to write this guide someday. Thanks to the marvelous venue that 123ish.com has turned into, I finally got it done!

So: The International ECommerce Guide To American Holidays. Find out why Groundhog Day is so weird, why we can’t predict when Easter will strike, and why your American team-mates might even need October 30th off. Even if you’re native, you’ll still learn something because I’ve tucked away some little-known chestnuts about the origins of the colored-in days on the United States calendar.

If anybody else has a similar guide for another country, I’d love to find out about it. In fact, if you’re not from the United States, why not write an international guide for your country’s holidays? I, myself, would like more insight on what, for example, a “boxing day” is.