This entire post is a response to the article “What Happened To You?” written by Kristen Franklin… who also happens to be my beautiful girlfriend. I started writing it as a comment and then decided I wanted to share it here. Go read her article first if you’d like…
I still pretend and day dream a lot. It’s fun. I know my day dreams aren’t real, and that my life is not all that grand. But I’m happy with my life, so the day dreams are just… entertainment.
I think we all lose a little of that wide-eye’d-ness as we get older. Because we’ve lived through more failures than successes, usually, and we no longer imagine it’ll be different the next time around. We no longer belive we can be an astronaut, or a rock star… or a lion.
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Last night VH1 ran a repeat of their Top 100 Hard Rock Songs countdown. It was glorious.
The countdown was suspiciously overrun with 80s hair metal, though. But that’s okay, I like hair metal. The 80s hair metal bands of then, remind me of what being a nerd now represents. Metal bands really get into it. Make-up. Towers of flames on stage. Leather. Blood. Zombies. Any metal band’s stage show would rival the best production of Rocky Horror.
But I guess I can get into that because I also love 80s cheesy horror films. I own the entire Nightmare on Elm Street franchise on DVD, including the 3-D version of Freddy’s Dead. I have a whole box of old issues of Fangoria, the horror movie and make-up magazine. I have an autographed copy of Robert Englund’s biography. Englund played Freddy in all seven of the original movies.
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A lot of people who read this blog also write their own blogs. A lot of those people also complain that no one reads their blogs. These same people have usually never heard of search engine optimization, or SEO.
SEO is the practice of making your website and individual webpages as attractive as possible to search engines. Search engines, like Google, “crawl” your website with their bots. These bots read every line of code on your page, and catalog every word. This is awesome because Google will now add your page to their search results.
But before your webpage can show up in search results, it has to be ranked. How Google ranks a page is a bit of a “family secret” and while they don’t come right out with it, there are a few things you can do to crack that secret.
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Two weeks ago, The Onion wrote an article called “Time Between Thing Being Amusing, Extremely Irritating Down To 4 Minutes”. The article quotes fake research data showing new memes come and go quicker than ever before, with most people realizing after just 90 seconds that the thing was never funny to begin with.
They predict that by the year 2023 the feelings of amusement and irritation will happen simultaneously, “the two emotions effectively canceling each other out and leaving one feeling nothing whatsoever.”
It would be fantastic if every living human being were as intelligent as an Onion editor.
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In high school I’d hit up the local record shop, Crow’s Nest, at least once a week. The vast majority of the money I made at my after school job, and recording bands in their garages, went right back into buying CDs.
Some days I would dig through the imports sections, other days the box sets and singles. A few times I’d even hit up the New Releases wall. I hadn’t heard of most of the garbage on there, but occasionally the album art alone would be enough to get me to spend my hard earned $15 on a band I didn’t know.
This was before YouTube, before Pandora and before iTunes.
I “discovered” a lot of shitty bands by buying on album art alone. But for every ten Nickelbacks, there was one Isle of Q, one diamond in the rough.
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