June 2008

There are two sides to human nature, and they are forever at war. There is the cool, soul-dead rational side. There is the raging animal, all appetite, all anger. Neither side can win the battle, for to win is to destroy our own nature. Victory is cataclysm. It’s like that Star Trek episode with the two Kirks. No, not that one, the other one.

Monkey hate technology
Robot hate the monkey
They will fight eternally
Monkey vs. Robot!
Monkey vs. Robot!

I first saw this video seven or eight years ago. It’s always hung around in my head since then as a metaphor for our inner battles, and as a meta-metaphor for really cheesey metaphors. I lost track of it, and I couldn’t find it forever. But being that we now live in a world without obscurity, there it is, smack-dab on YooToob.

It’s brilliant. It’s stupid. It’s stupidly brilliant.

Click to play, Dummy.

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Smothered in a prolonged group hug.

Pierced in the forehead by a metallic Ninja hurling star.

In a fall from a high tower, while holding an armload of harpoons.

Blacking out from anesthesia as a group of fat guys close in with spoons.

Crushed by an inexplicable number of doilies.

Gummed to death by malicious old men.

Shot from a cannon onto a long, pointy stick.

Alone, on the subway, holding a potted fern.

And, finally,

Melanoma.

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You need to read more. You need to read a lot more. You need to read every damn book ever printed, right Bucky? Okay, so slack off and narrow that list down to, say, the thousand best books ever written. It’ll only cost you $7,989.50 (plus shipping).

This post is an experiment. I’ve recently been accepted as an Amazon Associate, meaning that if I link stuff here that people actually end up buying, I get a small percentage, and I’m posting to see if the links work properly. And why shouldn’t I test it with the most expensive set of books in the entire Amazon catalog? Hey, I might get lucky!

My aim with this blog is to learn how the Internet works, including online marketing. Eventually I’ll be doing some honest-to-gawd product reviews, but for now the main point is not that I manage to sell something, but to learn how online marketing gets done. So thank you for your indulgence as I give myself this marketing lesson today.

If you were to click the link below and do thing you know, deep down, that you really, really want to do, by my calculation I would make $319.58. I would very much like to have $319.58. In fact, maybe you should buy two sets, so that, I dunno, you could lend some of the books out to friends, and in that case I’d make $639.16. So why aren’t you getting out your credit cards and ordering, you buncha pikers? These pixels are costing me money! I neeeEeeEEEeeeeed this! Buy ten sets! ARRRIIIHARRRGGGHHH!!!

Not that the great classics of Western Civilization aren’t worth spending some time with. And at least one Amazon reviewer apparently actually bought the set. Quoting a reader review from the Amazon website:

This is an orgy for a book-lover. I have had a wonderful time from the moment I placed the order. They arrived in 25 boxes shrink-wrapped on a wooden pallet, over 750 lbs. of books. It took about twelve hours to unpack them, check them off the packing list (one for each box), and then check them off the list we downloaded from Amazon.com. They take up about 77 linear feet. 

Turns out I’ve actually read some of these. And there’s much, much more to read about it on the Amazon review pages (I’m an Amazon addict. I especially like reading one-star customer reviews. Indignation is a minor art.).

So check it out. And don’t feel obligated to buy it or anything. But check it out, and then buy it:

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Yesterday the nice folks at Daily Blog Tips posted a glossary for bloggers. Unfortunately,  they got a lot of it wrong. Below are my revisions.

A-List: That’s “A” for “Arianna,” as in “Huffington.” A-List Blogs are those with more power and prestige than others. They’re not bad people or anything, but that Dooce lady scares me, and I think I once saw Seth Godin eat a bug.

Akismet: A popular plug-in for WordPress blogs which automatically blocks comment spam, thus eliminating what is often the most interesting part of the conversation.

Archive: That special place on a blog where posts which have seldom been read are kept so that they may be more thoroughly ignored in the future.

Blog: That which was formerly achieved with a brick wall and a can of spray paint, and which is now affected with a file transfer protocol client and pixels.

Blogosphere: A sort of digitized English soccer riot, but without the respect for decorum.

Blogroll: A list of websites a blogger keeps in the hope that they will one day send him backlinks.

Digg: A mysterious icon at the bottom of this post with no known function. There are no reports to suggest that anyone has ever dared to click it.

Domain: Given the bleak and solitary nature of blogging, and considering the Seinfeldian sense of the word, a “domain” is that which a blogger spends many, many, many hours attempting to “master.”

Feedcount: The total number of RSS subscribers to a given blog (e.g., in the present instance, zero).

Google Analytics: Pornography for webmasters.

Niche: That designated subject which is officially neglected, often for weeks, while an author posts about politics.

Page View: What a blogger gets when a reader looks at his blog once. If that same reader looks at the blog again, the blogger gets a second Page View. And so on. Are we going too fast for you?

Pligg: Please. Somebody just made that word up. For crying out loud, stop wasting everybody’s time.

Splog: The hazy toxic smoke often seen polluting the skies above Splos Angeles.

Squornk: See? I can make up words too.

Technorati: A website that, theoretically, ranks blogs according to the number of links they receive from other websites. We say “theoretically,” because to date, no one has ever been able to get a Technorati page to load.

Twitter: The world’s largest 24-hour online ADHD support group.

Unique Visitors: People who visit your website who, for the purpose of web statistics, are deemed exactly as important as, and who are therefore considered interchangeable with, any other individual visitor to your site. Hence “Unique.”

WordPress: Blogging software developed by people who are probably having second thoughts now that they know it was used to compose this glossary.

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I don’t know if this is worth a whole blog post, but I’ve been clicking around Imeem.com and finding some nifty stuff there, nifty at least to me. The song provided below is an a cappella version of Randy Newman’s “Short People” by a group called The King’s Singers. And, no, I nevuh hoid uv em eeder.

Perhaps I should take a moment to point out that I actually like the songs and videos I’ve been posting here. The thought has occurred to me that since much of this (much? how about all, buster?) is offbeat and loopy, that maybe people could be thinking I’m only yanking chains with what I post.

On the contrary, I consider myself the standard of good taste and high art, and I provide these materials merely for your edification. Yes, clearly you’re all a bunch of filthy troglodytes, and I am all too aware that I am wasting my time in my fruitless efforts to bring you to civilization. But perhaps when the walls of the citadel are crumbled finally to dust, you will then find a moment to thank me for these vain attempts at instruction. Alas, your regrets will be futile, as I will already be lodged in my island fortress laughing at your post-apocalyptic horror from my giant mad genius evil display monitor.

Click to play, dummy!

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Adding to the list of the many, many reasons that I am way, way cooler than you are, dear reader, is the fact that I know Erin Jackson, who is a semi-finalist in this year’s Last Comic Standing tournament on the well-known and highly-regarded NBC Television Network.

Erin will appear in the Vegas round of LCS and I am certain that everyone in the DC comedy scene is rooting for her. In a world where there is a lot of pettiness and jealousy (much of it instigated by me), Erin has achieved the rare feat of being liked by everybody. And she’s a fun and insightful comic on stage as well.

Here’s her audition set from the NBC website:

So there you go, folks. As a reader of this blog, you now have a rooting interest in her success, and you are hereby commanded to follow her exploits in the days to come.

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The track is from The Flying Lizards, circa 1980. Great song, but the truth is that I’m just testing out imeem, which is another website that lets you embed music into your blog posts and whatnot online. There are a variety of sites like this, and I’ve found that most of them tend to be buggy. This one looks promising.

You’ve probably heard this song. If not, you’re in for a treat. And if you don’t like it, consider your good luck that I didn’t post a file from Jandek.

In my preview of this post, The Lizards seem to play just fine. Please post a comment if you have trouble getting the link to play, or even if you can play it just fine, and you want to tell me how much you hate it. ‘Kay?

Click to play, Dummy!

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When the burdens of life weigh heavy my soul, I often find solace in contemplating the life of the Great Emancipator.

I loves me my Hard Drinkin’ Lincoln.

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In one of my earliest posts on this blog I owned up to being my own worst obstacle. It’s the typical situation for me: I want to make progress but see no clear path, and so while I have many ideas and ambitions, I get frustrated in my inability to implement them.

Right now the biggest bugaboo is the design of this page. It’s functional, but bland. It needs to be engaging and memorable. And getting there requires… what? It’s not clear. I’ve looked at many, many available themes, and none of them seems quite right. I could pay a pro to customize one for me, but that would involve a layout of cash, and even more to the point: I’m so new to blogging that even if I did get the snazziest of pages, I might soon change my mind about what I want. Then I’d be just as frustrated with the new page as I am with this one.

So the alternative is to learn to design the page myself, or at least to know enough about the code to make adjustments to some existing theme to suit my needs. But that does not look easy. I’ll be exploring the ‘Net for better resources to help me along with this (and if you have any suggestions, please leave a comment!). So I’m at that point of intimidation right now, the point where I need to remind myself that, hey, lots of people do web design. It can’t be that hard.

A third option would be to just find a theme that I can live with, and shoehorn my imagination into that template. This is probably the route I will take in the short term. We’ll see.

The solution to all of this? Press on. As long as there is progress from month to month, I shouldn’t let myself get too frustrated about things. After all, it was just a few days ago that I set a To-Do List for myself. There’s plenty for me to spend my time on there.

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I’m thinking you’re tired. People are dumping on you, the insensitive louts. They expect you to solve their problems, never stopping to consider that maybe you’ve got some problems of your own.

Am I right? Yes, I am very right.

But I’m not here to dump on you. No, not me. I’m here to make you feel better, friend, if only for a moment. I’m gonna make your day. I’m gonna make you smile for a couple of minutes. Then you can get back to the louts, back to your lousy day, but maybe a little happier, a little lighter. So watch this viddie and thank me later.

Click to play, Dummy!

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If I were up on this sort of thing, I’d have an image to go with this post, maybe one of those canned clip-art pics of a dynamic pencil charging forward to check off an item on a page. But I realize that that is a trite idea, one that too many people would go for, and despite the dictum I’ve seen on so many How-To-Blog websites that every post should be accompanied with something more eye-catching than mere text, my battle against the cliche dooms me to plain text.

And already I’ve dug myself a hole: Now I am vulnerable to attack at any future point when I do lapse into cliche (count on it), and worse, I’ve dodged the real issue, and that is that I haven’t spent the time to figure out efficient ways to get more images into my posts.

That’s the real truth: If I were more savvy about grabbing useful images for posting, I probably woulda gone with the first idea, just like everybody else. And regretted it afterwards for being trite.  I am a sad mass of contradictions.

KillThisBlog has been running for two months now. I’m pleased with my progress. I’ve gone from knowing next to nothing to knowing the bare minimum, and that is an advance that I don’t want to dismiss as trivial. It’s a necessary threshold that every new blogger must cross. So yay for me. I’m walking through walls. Even better, I’ve managed to get several of the snazzy doo-dads onto my pages: I’ve gotten videos into my posts. Images, too. I’ve set things up from WordPress and Google to track my traffic stats. I’ve got the social marketing links at the ends of my posts (even if I’m still unclear on how to use them to bend the Internet to my will). And I’ve managed to get ads onto my pages, which is another important threshold to cross.

It’s been a fun project, and even with my teeny levels of traffic, I’m getting people clicking in from all over the planet. That’s cool in ways I thought I was too cynical to find exciting. So thanks to everyone who has been clicking in, even those who only got here by mistake.

With all that in mind, here are some of the main things on my mind, stuff I want to learn next:

• My blog header. I’ve found the theme I’ve been using (Greylagoon by Sureshjain) has been quite functional for now, but I want to learn how to dress things up more. I’d like to learn how to manipulate some images, to customize something that I can put up in the header to make this site less generic and more eye-catching. That means getting PhotoShop Elements, which I’ve already ordered. It should arrive sometime in the middle of this week (Toys are good). It also means learning some HTML (gulp!)
• E-Mail. I’ve been online since 1995. I’ve used AOL as my e-mail host almost from the beginning. It’s been fine for my needs until now, even though I know that in some circles an AOL e-mail address is considered the mark of a true Internet Doofus. So it’s time to set up some @killthisblog.com e-mail accounts. That I don’t know how makes clear to many of you, I’m sure, of how much of a novice I really am.
• My About Page. What is there now is just something I slapped together off the top of my head to fill the space. I need something more informative and more inviting there.
• RSS Feeds. I’ve only started using RSS feeds myself in the last few months. I want to make it as easy as possible for those who do use it to subscribe to this site. That means getting one of them orangy buttons that everyone seems to have. I’m guessing that it’s fairly easy to set up, but I’ll need to do some study.
• Better Understanding and Use of Ads. So far I’ve just got the Google Adsense, but I want to learn about Amazon, iTunes, and perhaps some other affiliate programs. I also need more finesse in ad placement — the one ad I do have is in the place where it decided to go, and not in the place I would have chosen to put it had I had any skill at such things.
• Better Understanding of Social Media Sites. I’m talking about sites like Digg, Twitter, Stumble, and so on, sites that allegedly provide bloggers with tools that can help them engage more thoroughly with their readers. I am skeptical about these tools, but I don’t want to dismiss them without more study. And I already have the doo-dads at the ends of my posts, so I should know what to do with them, yes?
• Setting Up Other Sites Under My Hosting Plan. I use HostICan as my web host and so far I have had nothing but positive experiences with them. I am supposed to be able to set up multiple sites under the hosting plan I have, but that would require mucking around with my hosting files. It’s probably easier than it appears to someone with zero expertise, but I’m still finding the project a bit daunting. I’ll get there. I’m never going to build an online empire if I don’t.

So those are the main things. No time limits — I’ll be satisfied as long as there’s steady progress month to month.

If anyone who happens on this post has any suggestions, please leave a comment — any new resources that come my way will be very welcome. And I hope that others find value in watching me grope my way through this process. I’m finding it more and more interesting the deeper I get into it.

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