I’m done.  Seriously, I’ve had it.  I’m done with the lies and the hype and the spam and the spin doctoring.  I’m done with “twitter methods” that promise thousands of followers and fame and fortune and all they really deliver is spam, affiliate marketing, and zombies – the precise thing they claim to avoid.

You want to ruin any desire you had to ever use twitter for what it is – a microblogging, communication platform?  Here’s what you do:

Step 1 – find some kind of site, network, ebook, method, scam, or tool that requires you to auto-follow people who follow you.  It doesn’t matter what site, network, ebook, method, scam, or tool you choose.  There’s plenty to choose from.  Some are free, and some are $97.  This is the single best way to crap up your twitter account.

Now why would I say it craps up your account?  Isn’t it required to send Direct Messages to people on twitter to follow them?  Doesn’t that hinder communication?

You want to know what hinders communication?  Not being able to read the stuff that I actually wanted to read to begin with.  Having to dig through line after line after line of bile I don’t care about, and retweeted links I saw 2 hours ago.  Having to filter through teeth whitening, and auto-fed links from Google Alerts that probably the twitter user in question hasn’t even read.  You want to know what hinders communication?  Being auto-DM’d shite links for more affiliate crap, scams, networks, ebooks, tools, and twitter methods that require me to join their network or buy their book.  Not being able to even look at my own DMs and creating a rule in Outlook to auto-delete all DMs that aren’t a message from TrueTwit to verify my identity, because the alternative is hundreds of emails a day for garbage I don’t care about.  That hinders communication.  Not able to send a DM?  @mention me and deal.

That brings me to Step 2 on how to ruin your twitter experience.

Step 2 – Auto DM your new followers.  What better way to make your twitter experience miserable than to spread some misery of your own?  Here’s a clue: no one likes auto-DMs.  The whole world of twitter has turned into a den of con-jobs, marketers, and spam, and the whole auto-DM thing basically ruins Direct Messaging as a whole.  The solution?  Stop following stupid people.  I propose that from now on, anyone who auto-DMs anyone else is instantly unfollowed.  Honestly, I don’t care what you have to say if what you have to say is forced on me in a Direct Message.  Now, some people just say Hi in an auto-DM, and those people I may be able to tolerate.  Maybe.  But if there’s http://anythingatall I don’t care, you go into the fecking trash bin.  If I followed you, probably I looked at your home url and thought you were cool, but if you are going to send me the same url I already know – or worse, send me your affiliate coded link to whatever-the-crap you’re selling – you’re on a fast track to my shit list.  And honestly, I should make a shit list, now that twitter’s added lists…

Step 3 – follow a whole bunch of people you don’t really care about.  Now why would you do this?  Simple: because some twitter method told you to.  Or because some site or network that guarantees hundreds or even thousands of followers requires it.  If you don’t care what they have to say, why bother?  So what’s the definition of “someone you don’t really care about”?  Well, one trick is to go into someone’s follower list who you do care about, and follow all of their recent followers.  You know nothing about any of these people, whether they’re robots, humans, porn, or spam, you just click click clickety-click through page after page after page until you’ve capped out your maximum number of users you can follow in a day.  Effing fantastic, sounds like a great way to waste a half hour.  While you’re at it, you might as well try to scoop out your eyeballs with a spoon, pour some mustard on them, and eat them for breakfast for all the good either of those things will do you.

Here’s the thing: twitter is all about communication and sharing.  At its best, it opens up a channel to communicate globally about topics you’re interested in, with people you would never have known about otherwise.  As such, it comes down to Dunbar’s number: 150.  You honestly can’t keep up with a whole lot more than 150 people and have a real, engaging, two-way dialog with those people.  It’s been proven in studies that Facebook users with hundreds of friends really only actually keep in touch with a small handful.  Our brain just can’t handle relationships in excess of  a few dozen.

So, with twitter, if you are following a ton of people, into the thousands, your twitter stream becomes an unreadable landfill of refuse that never ends.  There’s no conversation, only chaos, and amidst the chaos is spam and ads and affiliate marketing and crap.  Sure, about 50% of those thousands of people (maybe more, but it’s always been roughly 1:2 when I’ve tested this theory) will give you a reciprocal follow, but who cares?  It’s just a number, it doesn’t mean anything.  Most of those reciprocal follows are from auto-following zombies like you’ve made yourself into.

There are those that will say that the numbers mean everything.  That it’s all about the numbers, and the content doesn’t even matter.  That once you hit a magic twitter number, say 10,000, you’re set.  You can advertise anything, blog anything, sell anything, and have enough people click it that you can make a decent living off it.  Even if only 1% of your followers click on your links or ads, that 1% still amounts to 100 people, and that still equates to a lot of traffic/money.

The reality is this theory is bullshit.

No, really, it’s bullshit.

I say this as someone who’s tested and used one of these fabulous “twitter methods” for several months.  Let me give you a little comparison.  I have our business website Arcane Palette.  Arcane Palette has a twitter account @ArcanePalette.  I ran through the steps of setting up the “twitter method” on @ArcanePalette for about a week and stopped shy of adding 1000+ people to follow.  I probably got to 800 or so that I was following, and quit.  I left the account sit, and gradually the follower (and following) numbers exceeded 1000 because I was doing reciprocal follows.  The twitter stream was unreadable, but it didn’t matter because I had other accounts (namely @jazzs3quence) that I actually read.  I didn’t pay much attention to who ended up following @ArcanePalette.

On the other side I set up several different twitter accounts that all ultimately directed to jazzsequence.com.  At the beginning, they were pointing to the home page, and then later they were directing traffic to specific pages reviewing (with my fabulous affiliate link embedded) aforementioned “twitter method”.  In total, I only set up about 4 or 5 accounts but I got each one to 1000 followers before moving on and creating a new account.  I tried every trick that all of the supporters of the “twitter method” said to do: automated tweets with my affiliate link to sell copies of it, automated tweets by feeding links via twitterfeed, I even made myself sound important like I was actually getting sales (although never actually lying and saying it outright.  I’m sure some will say that was my problem).  With 1 account at over 3000 followers, 3 accounts at over 1000 followers each, and 1 account with several hundred (because I stopped mid-week) all pumping links and ads and trackbacks to my site, you’d think that eventually I’d get a single affiliate sale.  Nope.  Not a one.  If there are people with 10,000 followers saying they can make hundreds or even thousands of dollars a day getting 9 or 10 sales everyday, you’d assume with a combined total nearing 7,000 followers that I’d get at least one.  In six months.

It’s a lie: no one’s selling anything. Or not at the scale they say they are.

And what do I get in return?  At first, just looking at numbers, I compared the growth of my twitter followers to the increase in traffic to my blog.  I figured, even if the sales didn’t come, whatever, I’m not a salesman and I don’t want to be.  But traffic is good both for my site and Arcane Palette, and if it helped to generate traffic to either of those places, then that would help me/us get a higher Google PageRank (secret: it didn’t).  Sure, the hits to my blog increased steadily, roughly in line with the twitter numbers.  But on the other hand, there’s @ArcanePalette, doing none of the spam, only occasional autofed (and dare I say relevant) design links from blogs I follow and respect, and then a feed for new posts on our website.  Arcane Palette gets more traffic by a significant margin by using none of the sneaky tricks to grab people from twitter.  Sure, twitter is one of the biggest sources of links to jazzsequence.com, but the average time on the site is generally under a minute, wheras the average time on arcanepalette.com ranges from 4-9 minutes.  The majority of people who land on jazzsequence.com couldn’t give a crap about me or my site, not really, regardless of how I got them there, so that increase in numbers really just amounts to two things: Jack. Shit.  (I guess that really counts as just one thing.)  if I get 50% or more of my traffic to jazzsequence.com from twitter, but all of it is just a brief glance, wheras I get actual, quality traffic from Google, design sites, and various other places (including, occasionally, twitter), then I could care less about the 30 second traffic from twitter, I really could.

Sure, there might be some great people in the midst of the hundreds of people a day I’m meant to follow according to the “twitter method” but how would I ever know?  Only luck would allow me to actually notice one of their tweets in between br.it.ney fu.ck.ed and “whiten your teeth now”.

I’m not the first person to say that automatically reciprocating all follows is a bad idea.  And probably, if all you want to do is set up hundreds of twitter accounts selling affiliate products and cumulatively generating thousands of links, a fraction of a percentage of which actually result in sales, then using one of these wonderful twitter methods is great for you.  But if you actually want to use twitter as a social networking application, engage with people, & learn things you didn’t know before, then following someone else’s rules for how to use twitter is a surefire way to make you hate everything about twitter and not use it the way it was meant to be used.

And how is it meant to be used?  However the hell you want to use it.  the rules are there are no rules.  It’s like a dance – it’s a fledgling technology that has adapted to the way the users have used it and the users adapt to the changes the technology implements based on how it’s used.

Take it from someone who went around the block and finally came back home and wondered what the fuck was I thinking? If I’m doomed to obscurity with this blog because I didn’t completely sell out and start posting porn to boost my traffic numbers, then into obscurity I go.  I’ve got better things to do than to waste another minute on one guy’s dream to put more cash into his own pocket at any cost.

Related posts:

1. Twitter kills bulk and automated unfollows…and we’re disappointed why?
2. twitter schoolbus experiment
3. twitter schoolbus: some tricks i’ve found

WTF, dude?  I mean, I know we haven’t talked in like 25 years or something, but really?  Cancelling the best show on TV (Dollhouse, duh), and what do we get instead in 2010?  Freaking Caprica?  Are you on drugs?  And don’t even get me started on Stargate: Universe…or, rather Stargate: Who’s Driving this Bus? No one, the same person writing the fecking script.

Just so there’s no misunderstandings next year, here’s my wishlist for next winter holiday.  You have plenty of time, Santa.  Don’t.  Screw.  It.  Up.

1. A standalone Google Wave client.  Google Wave is cool, right, and with Chrome I can make an application shortcut and have it behave like its own app.  So this should be pretty easy, since the platform has its’ own set of built-in gadgets.  All I want is the freaking menu bar to blink when I have a new message/wave.  Seriously, is that so hard?
2. A Joss Whedon show that doesn’t get cancelled after 2 seasons.
3. For that matter, a Dollhouse movie would be nice.
4. HBO and Showtime to join Starz in signing lasting contracts with Netflix to stream movies and TV shows, thereby adding, like, every movie ever into Netflix’s Instant Viewing database.
5. Netflix, Hulu, or someone to make some sort of deal to offer pay-per-view, online screenings of movies that are in theaters right now.
6. Universally accepted CSS/HTML standards that eliminate browser compatibility issues.  Dammit.
7. Heroes to either be put to death, or else to not suck, whichever is less impossible.
8. Steam, nVidia, or OnLive to launch a cloud computing video game streaming service so I don’t need to upgrade my graphics card every time I want to play a new game.
   8-a.  Steam, nVidia, and/or OnLive to not be competitors in the cloug computing video game streaming industry.  It would be ridiculous to have to have 3 different monthly subscriptions or some such bullshit.
9. Frickin’ Flying Cars.  Seriously, it’s 2010, and the best we can do is a single company running space tourism jaunts into low orbit for rich folk?! If you can’t give me flying cars, the least you could do is those hoverboards from Back to the Future II so I can fall on my face and break my nose.
10. A fat wad of cash that falls from the sky and is completely tax-free so we can finish fixing up the house and spend all day making WordPress themes.

also, a lifetime supply of chocolate from any of these companies would also be appreciated:

• Amano
• Chocolot
• Lake Champlain
• 2400 Phinney
• Fran’s

Oh, and Santa, if you could arrange to not have the Christmas season (by which I mean when Christmas music and decorations start appearing in malls and stores) start the day after Halloween and put it back to the day after Thanksgiving the way it used to be, that would be great.

thanks.  your pal,
~c

p.s. all the usual items on my wishlist (world peace, an end to global hunger and poverty, universal health care, an environmentally stable future, a MacBook Pro) are still implied.  thx.

Related posts:

1. Free Blogger Template: Dear Audrey
2. Free Blogger Template: dear Audrey
3. i still have wave invites

Just because *you* buy music after nabbing it illegally, you are mistaken to assume that other people do the same thing. According to many recent surveys, the majority of college students illegally download 100% of their music. That means they don’t decide to buy the records when they realize they enjoy the band. They are happy with the MP3.

well, it’s time to burst that bubble.  according to this article in a uk digital media journal:

Adults who download music from unofficial channels also spend £30 per year more on physical and digital music than people who don’t, according to a survey by the Demos thinktank of 1,008 people aged 16 to 50.

The study – funded by Virgin Media - says a third of adults go illegal. But the additional money they spend contributes £200 million to the music economy each year.

now i’m sure you’re going to try to get me on the “the survey skirts over the vast cost of piracy to the industry” part, but the main point of the article — and what Virgin was studying — was that digital subscription sites — exactly like what i was proposing a week ago — are viable options as a deterrent to piracy, if the price is right.  and honestly, it has been proposed for a while that this could be an option for college campuses where, as sam pointed out, piracy is rampant.  it’s my opinion that if colleges were able to offer some kind of subscription service — maybe even bundled in tuition or room and board — students could download all they wanted, and not even realize that they were doing so legitimately.  they’d be happy, sam would be happy, the riaa would be happy, and whoever developed the software infrastructure to cover the service would be very happy.  this article just confirms what i’ve been saying for a while, so i just wanted to take this opportunity to say: nyah nyah, i told you so.  what the music industry needs to realize is that you need geeks.  you need us to tell you what is going on outside and how you should adapt to the changing times.  because it’s obvious that you are way behind the times.

Related posts:

1. fix the broken music industry, revisited
2. more on the music industry filesharing debate
3. fix the music biz by taking cues from the porn industry

and this story is called, as you could probably tell…

how am i going to tell my kids there’s no christmas this year?

(cue dramatic music)

so, i used to do tech support.  for a long, long while i was a tech support monkey, and i got my monkey start working for a callcenter who was doing support for MSN.  MSN is, or at least was many years ago, microsoft’s answer to AOL.  they’re both the devil, really.  they’re both glorified browsers with a bunch of crap added on that are supposed to make browsing easier but really just crowd your screen.  i will say that after msn8 was released, i did use it — at work — but it was slow and bogged down my computer at home.  and i couldn’t imagine wanting to use it over a dialup connection, which is what most of the folks calling in were on at that time.

tech support is usually divided up into three tiers, and these tiers’ functions vary depending on the company and infrastructure.  tier 1 is invariably the front line.  they are the first people you talk to when you have a problem.  doesn’t matter what problem it is, you’re talking to some tier one schmuck.  and most of them are schmucks.  even though officially you weren’t supposed to move up to a higher tier until you’d been on tier 1 for at least 3 months, i got a tier 3 position in a little over a month.  only the schmucks or the n00bs are ever left on tier 1.  tier 1 is trained to try to get first call resolution.  and probably 8 times out of 10 they can, because most problems are dumb.  it’s the other 2 that leave you, the customer, screaming at your tier 1 schmuck and begging him for something, anything, else, because you’ve already flushed your cookies and cache, you’ve rebooted the computer and the modem, and you’ve repoptimized your msn client — whatever the hell that does — and you still can’t connect to the internet.

at the call center i worked at, msn tier 3 handled all escallations, which means billing, customer service, and technical support escalations.  billing was, understandably, always the worst.  usually folks were okay if you refunded a couple months back to them.  but we had a policy not to do more than 3 months.  technically we had the ability to do more (with manager approval — hint: they wouldn’t), but it was discouraged.  (I think later they disabled the actual ability to do more than 3 months, but those of us who had that ability before, kept it later.)

My most difficult call is also, in retrospect, my most amusing story, and is a lesson about keeping your finances in check.  Being on tier 3, we got a lot of calls from customers who had gotten a new computer at best buy.  best buy was running a promo at the time that signed you up for 3 months of free msn internet service when you bought your computer on your credit card (or visa/mastercard debit card).  i agree, the deal was pretty slimy.  from what i understood, it sounded pretty difficult to not get the msn service, and anyway, who can argue with free internet?  this didn’t stop us from being really snotty towards the people who didn’t realize they were being billed months after the billing cycle started.  we got these calls every day.  does anyone actually look at their credit card or bank statements?  i started to doubt they did.

so one day in december i got a call from an angry african american lady in chicago.  i remember chicago, because the people who called me from chicago when i worked at msn were always angry.  (it’s one of those social stereotypes that somehow just always applies, like everyone from the east coast is brash and a little (or, often, a lot) offensive, and everyone from the south, particularly african americans in the south, are pretty cool.)  i once got a call from a lady whose phone number was on a list of dialup access numbers, so she was constantly barraged by phone calls from modems — she was angry, also, she was in (or around) chicago.  why she didn’t just change her number, i didn’t understand. (“why should i have to change my number. you’re the ones with the problem.”)  back to this angry african american lady in chicago.  she had a pretty good sob story: the family was low on cash, they had a couple kids and they couldn’t afford christmas presents this year.  “i really hate to have to put all this on you,” she said, “i’m not trying to ask for a handout.*”

“okay, how can i help you?”

“well i bought this computer last year, and i just noticed you guys have been charging me every month for msn that i’m not using.”

the story was obvious: she bought a computer at best buy, paid on credit card, and was automatically signed up for 3 months of free msn.  after the trial period, the billing cycle had started.  the amazing thing was that she has been billed for a year — and it really had been almost a full year, like 10 or 11 months — without noticing.  i explained the likely scenario and she seemed to agree that that was likely the case.

“well, i can’t give you a full refund, but based on your situation, i can cancel your account and refund the last three months,” i said.  that wasn’t good enough.  the phone call escalated more and more, and each time i explained that i could not refund more than 3 months.  she wanted the full year.  she made accusations and threats and — at the peak of hysteria — screamed into the phone, half-sobbing, half full of pure rage: “how am i going to tell my kids there’s no christmas!”

newsflash: why don’t you start by explaining to your kids that you are so unable to manage your own money that you not only signed up for an internet service without realizing it, but additionally, didn’t realize that you had been billed every month for said internet.. service.

* dialog is approximated and probably not the actual things that were spoken.  the christmas line, however, is too good to be something i made up.  that actually happened.

sometime after this she asked to speak with my supervisor and i was more than happy to let her.  of course, he didn’t want to talk to her at all, and ended up getting in a shouting match with her.  i, at least, had kept my cool.  (at least, i think i did.  for the purposes of this story, we’ll just assume i did.)

sidenote: i recently got slammed with a $400 charge for 2 $200 itunes gift cards i did not purchase.  someone had gotten into my itunes account,  and used it — which had already been pre-loaded with my paypal account — to purchase 2 $200 gift cards for two anonymous and random users at 5:20am when myself, my kids, our cats, and erin were all sleeping.  i filed a dispute with paypal and they refused to refund the charges, stating that they’d tracked the transaction to my ip address, and they don’t issue refunds for “buyer remorse.”  i filed a similar dispute to reverse charges with wells fargo (because the first $200 had pulled from my paypal balance, but the second $200 had overflowed into our bank account), and they reversed the charges without a second glance.  important note: paypal is a business — it is not a banking institution.  it should never be assumed that paypal is a bank.  this assumption makes it easy to assume they will be on your side in a dispute.  they aren’t.  they want their money and they only get their money when money changes hands.  they are on the side of the seller.  i talked to a lawyer friend/client who was similarly outraged, and suggested filing a police report, and taking paypal to small claims court, but i really didn’t really want to go through the trouble.  i filed it as a loss, changed my itunes email address, changed the password associated with all accounts that used that email address, removed all but one email address from paypal and changed that password, and now, use paypal for as little as possible (except, when necessary, billing clients, but mostly we use google checkout now).

here’s the hidden moral: there’s lots of ways for businesses that are both benevolent and morally gray to get at your money.  don’t make it easy.  if you ever are required to give out your credit card number and it isn’t clear why or what it might be used for, and you aren’t directly making a purchase (like subscription services such as itunes, xbox live, wii store, etc), for gods’ sake, be conscious of what you are doing, and know that now that they have your credit card number, it will be used whenever money needs to change hands for a purchase, whether you are aware of it or not.  when i filed my complaint with itunes, they brushed me off: i had submitted my paypal information, therefore, as far as they were concerned, i authorized the use of my paypal account.  they encouraged me to settle the dispute with paypal.  thank you, drive through.  (that is, what we in the tech support biz called a flog — a generic response that the recipient can’t act on immediately, that gets them off the phone.  another flog could be reboot your computer and try again, or buy an antivirus software, run a scan, and call back if you still have problems.)  honestly, i have no idea what inspired me to link my paypal account with my itunes account. probably it was just the fact that i could.  i never used it, and i’ve never payed for mp3s (p.s. i used that in my defense — paypal wasn’t impressed).

and here’s a bonus hint: don’t blame other people for your own failings.  the people i dealt with at msn that i issued refunds to (particularly those i issued the maximum refunds to) all had one thing in common: they were all hopelessly unaware of their own finances.  they allowed themselves to be charged several months’ worth of internet service before noticing.  it’s not the fault of the internet service provider that you can’t have christmas, it’s your own fault for not looking at your credit card statement and maxing out your cards.  if there’s no christmas, it’s no one’s fault but your own.

Related posts:

1. nin – year zero
2. year zero

image from Wikipedia

Download audio file (littleargumentwithmyself.mp3)

this is the argument i have in my head:

upstart blogger has been around for a while. he’s established trust with his honest representation of things. he approaches topics reasonably. he’s also exposed a few twitter scams and pyramid schemes. he’s built a good reputation. also, he makes a lot of money blogging: a lot more than i do (which is none). the only money-making links he has on his site are his affiliate program with AN hosting and, now, Twitter Rocket. Twitter Rocket, therefore, must be like a gift from god, given all the reviews…

really? what’s so special about it that’s different than the scams he’s exposed? the language he (and his following) uses about it make it sound exactly like other twitter scams.

surely you can’t fault someone who’s discovered something worthwhile for trying to profit from it. that’s what any product is. you’re paying for something that someone (multiple someones) finds valuable. that’s not a scam.

the self-perpetuating cycle of twitter rocket -> affiliate links -> twitter rocket sales feels pretty scammy.

that’s just using the system.

seems to me that @blogginghannah abuses the system. her twitter stream is littered with twitter rocket aggrandizement, and she’s purportedly the top seller. as glorybug posed the question: is it possible to make money with anything else?

sure it is….in theory. but if it’s a great product, and you’re using it, and you think it’s great, you become the perfect salesperson. it’s just part of the system.

that kind of system will break, won’t it? i mean, if it was really so awesome, everyone would eventually either be using it, or refusing to use it.

we’ll see, i guess.  however, there are enough twitter users that that won’t happen for a very long time.

what about all the upstart blogger wannabe’s? luke davis’ (aka @sixfigureluke’s) comment over here uses almost the same language as upstart blogger when dealing with people who haven’t used twitter rocket but make claims against it. even @blogginghannah occasionally uses the same voice in her blog. mondo dynamo is no different. and they both use wordpress themes that are based on ashley’s own (or at least an older version of upstart blogger). could it be that they’re all just characters ashley morgan has created to sell his product?

occam’s razor: it’s easier to believe that they are actual people than to believe the web of intricacies necessary for them to be fictional. plus, it would sell his product a lot better if it actually worked.

that doesn’t mean it’s not true…

no. just highly, highly unlikely.

it would appear than that twitter rocket is without fail. so, what’s the holdup?

i can’t see it.

excuse me?

i can’t see it. when i go to best buy and buy a game, i’ve read reviews of it. the reviews talk about what the game is like, who it was made by, what the gameplay is like, what other games it resembles, and rates it accordingly. when i go to the store, i look at it, check out the graphics, read the description, and then decide if i want to shell out fifty bucks for it. since i don’t know the details of how twitter rocket is so great, and so much better than everything else, and completely NOT like those other twitter scams (although we’re not sure exactly why), i distrust it. it feels scammy. moreover, it feels exactly like all those other money-making schemes where there’s this great thing, but we can’t tell you what it is until you buy it:

what i have in this box is the most remarkable thing you’ve ever seen. once you see it, you’ll wonder how you lived without it.
what’s in the box?
i will reveal it to you after you pay me $97.
i just want to know what’s in the box.
i can’t tell you what’s in the box. i can only tell you that it is so very valuable, that you could potentially make that $97 back in a matter of hours.
um. great. what’s in the box?

that’s true. but what if it is true? what if i really can make that money back quickly? if it pays for itself, and then some, isn’t it worth the investment?

it depends. i hate being a salesperson. if using twitter rocket means all i ever do is tweet about how great twitter rocket it like hannah does, i would hate myself, passive income or no.

but twitter rocket claims that it can support any kind of revenue. and anyway, it’s just the method to get followers, it’s not a money-making tactic in itself.

no, but i’ve yet to see much evidence to the contrary.

…and so on. it drives me completely nuts. or at least, was driving me completely nuts until i decided to just try to figure out my own method. and that’s the thing: since revealing (sort of) twitter rocket, ashley morgan has polarized his followers. they’re either in the “yay twitter rocket yay” camp, or they’re in the “you self-centered hypocrite — you’re selling the same crap that you just revealed as a scam” camp. and i’m smack in the middle, swinging from one pole to the other.

that’s why i’m revealing my process. and that’s why, if my process results in enough sales (through my two, count them, two affiliate links on my blog — twitter rocket and 1and1 hosting), then i will check out twitter rocket myself and see how it works. and maybe i’ll become one of the people shouting to the masses what a wonderful tool it is. or maybe i’ll just be a tool for having spent money on something i could have figured out on my own.

(p.s. you can help “sponsor” the project by buying something, you know.  just click on the link and sign up for one of those two things.  i wouldn’t put them there if i didn’t think they were worthwhile.)

Related posts:

1. a social experiment
2. the secret to making money online is there is no secret
3. twitter schoolbus experiment

kathy gets picked up by the police for the 2nd time

this will be my last disnts post.  why? because they’re boring.  i’m boring myself talking about it.  the lives of my sims just aren’t interesting enough to warrant a blog about them.  maybe i’m too involved, but it seemed to me like when i left free will to do most of the work, they just went through the motions…which is pretty much what sims do.  maybe there’s just not enough drama — certainly i don’t have anything like the parents being enemies with their kids, but i figured both parents being criminals and generally horrible people would, you know, probably result in a troubled youth.  maybe it’s that i don’t actively sabotage their happiness.  i’m not sure.  but i’m playing the game, and i’m playing it, and i realize that there just isn’t anything interesting enough to report.  even when kathy was carted off to the police station (again) it still wasn’t really all that newsworthy, more anticlimactic.

in the end, it’s a game.  it’s like the other sims games, only better.  yes, the wishes and lifetime goals thing is cool, and it engages the player to drive the characters toward something.  but it would be ridiculous for me to try to make my characters’ story more important than anyone else’s.  the whole point of the game is that everyone, no matter who they are, has a story, each story is different and unique, and each story is worth telling and experiencing.  that’s what the sims is: it’s a self-evaluation of who we are as people and we’re all interesting, and boring, and we each have triumphs and failures and that’s what it is.  what makes alice and kev different (in my opinion) is that it is telling a story that is often seen but not heard.  how many homeless people have you had an actual conversation with lately?  but it’s not as if we can’t imagine what their lives are like, or what our lives would be like were we in the same situation.  alice and kev are just a reminder, and a way to experience the emotional impact of their daily struggles.

so that’s all.  go play the sims.  watch your characters grow up and fall in love and die and live eventful, or uneventful lives and don’t forget, in the process, to live eventful lives yourself.  the sims is just, after all, a reflection of who we are, and the story it tells is the story of us.

Related posts:

1. sims 3: the disnts
2. disnts: downtime
3. writing

today, however, i got something that seriously blew my mind.

one of the general themes of the racist brand of forwards i get is that outsourcing or getting any kind of products from abroad hurts our country.  (we’ll set aside, for a moment, the socio-economic implications in how our economy would really be crippled if we stopped importing products altogether, suffice it to say that we’ve been importing ever since the first pilgrims jumped on the boat from England.)  therefore, it’s no surprise that the title of this email is “DO IT YOURSELF, AMERICA.”

So here is an actual excerpt of the email, first paragraph:

I WAS BUYING FOOD THE OTHER DAY AT THE COUNTRY MARKET. ON THE LABEL OF SOME PRODUCTS IT SAID FROM CHINA. FOR EXAMPLE THE” OUR FAMILY” BRAND OF THE MANDARIN ORANGES SAYS RIGHT ON THE CAN FROM CHINA I WAS SHOCKED!!…

it then proceeds into a rant about how we should be producing our own food rather than importing “inferior” products from abroad.  really?  mandarin oranges?  from china?  you don’t say.

a quick glance at etymonline — the online etymology dictionary — will reveal that the origin of the word mandarin  refers to a Chinese official.  the usage of the word Mandarin, as in Mandarin Chinese, came about by referring to the specific dialect used by officials and educated people, i.e. the Mandarins.  the mandarin oranges were so named because their color resembled the color of the robes worn by…Mandarins.

wiki’ing “manarin orange” casts an even harsher light on the ridiculousness of the above statement.  in the middle of the article is a chart showing the top 10 countries producing mandarin oranges.  not only does the united states not even rank on this chart, but the number one producer of mandarin oranges?  china.  really?  really.

so, let’s summarize: mandarin oranges are named after mandarins, which was a type of chinese official, because the color of their robes resembled the color of the fruit.  the world’s largest producer of mandarin oranges is, no surprise here, china — by a significant margin.  to beat a dead horse, and because the united states wasn’t even listed in the top 10 countries producing mandarin oranges, i tried to find out where dole — one of the u.s. alternatives the email suggests — gets their mandarins.  dole’s own website says that their mandarin oranges are actually japanese satsuma oranges.  i wonder where those come from.

the thing that gets me isn’t the us-vs.-them mentality, or the racism inherent in the belief that products from China are, by their nature, inferior.  it’s the fact that this argument was started over mandarin oranges.  not just any oranges, mandarin.  which are, by default, chinese.  i mean, it’s in the name — not of the brand, but of the fruit.

i’m glad we have a president who is an intelligent black man, and i’m glad he’s selected a woman from a poor puerto rican family — whose father didn’t speak english — to be a supreme court justice,  if, for no other reason, than because it forces people to confront others with a different heritage — one that’s obvious by their physical characteristics.  but we, as a wired culture, need to be responsible about the information we digest.  not only is it easy to perpetuate blatant lies and twist information, but in our digital culture it is just as easy to publish those falsehoods to a wide audience.   if one didn’t already know, it would take maybe five minutes to learn that mandarin oranges come from china, and maybe then the moral outrage about chinese mandarin oranges would be diffused somewhat.  i’m not against favoring local producers — in fact, i buy local foods if and whenever possible.  but just because it comes from another country doesn’t mean it’s tainted.  however, i encourage people to read labels, buy fair trade products, buy local, buy organic — these things are good not only for you as a conscientious consumer but for the environment, for the workers plowing the fields, and for your body.

meanwhile, i’m less interested in the fact that mandarin oranges were imported from china and more interested in why dole chose not to publish the fact that their “mandarin oranges” were actually satsuma oranges, and where they got their oranges from.  

in doing research for this post, i stumbled across GoodGuide, a searchable index that publishes information about how producers rank in terms of health, environmental impact, and the working conditions for their employees, which looks pretty freaking awesome, and makes deciding what to do with the information printed on labels much easier and gives it a context in comparison with other manufacturers.  i think the next wave would be an iphone app or a handheld device that you could take into the store with you, scan a barcode, and then pull up all the relevant information about that product laid out like what this site does.

Related posts:

1. “One Big Ass Mistake, America”
2. Jon Stewart Sums Up Everything That is Wrong with America
3. Organizing for America | BarackObama.com | We Want Our Money Back

having worked at whole foods, i always choose Simply Orange by default.  it’s been a while since i’ve taste-tested OJ, myself, and i know G doesn’t really care which brand, but i feel better about Simply because i get the impression (whether it’s based on fact or clever marketing) that it’s more natural.  so this quasigoth chick was checking out and saw me and gavin and our Simply Orange and told me, very badly, about this ad with an “easy” girl and a “hard” girl, and how it was Tropicana vs. Simply Orange and the “hard” girl was supposed to be Simply Orange.  or something.  so i Googled this crazy concept and lo! i found this:

girls should be easy

the social context is bizarre, archaic, misogynist, and a host of other words that are not favorable to tropicana’s ad campaign.  but possibly what i find most interesting is that not only do i identify more with the not-easy side in terms of juice brands, but i also identify more with the not-easy girl in the example.  also: i like the shape of Simply Orange’s bottle, thank you.  i don’t care if there’s not a handle.

read the commentary in the post that’s linked above because it’s definitely worthwhile and interesting.  not terribly surprising, all things considered, but there are some good points and possibly the only thing that did really open my eyes about this whole thing was that i really thought we had moved past this type of social and gender stereotyping.  and, is easy really better?  cuz i kinda think not…

Related posts:

1. mandarin america
2. a girl named jinx
3. robot ethics

at the end of his explanation of rss and what it can do for you and how he implements it on his site — and i have to give him props because a lot of bloggers force you to go to the site for full content, especially when there’s art and graphics or at least extended articles — he has a link to a blog post on colorburned  for 127 rss feeds that all designers should subscribe to.

127?  really?

seriously.  i check twitter, i glance at rss, i read my email, and somewhere in the middle of that and working a part-time job working in cheese, i get some design done.  when the frack am i going to have time to read 127 feeds?  i mean, really.  and that’s the thing i have against these posts.  53 grunge themes?  how about giving me the 5 best, because i guarantee there’s 48 that suck, and there’s not enough hours in the day to check every single one of these links.  127 rss feeds that all designers should subscribe to?  and in keeping up on those 127 feeds, when exactly am i going to have time to, i don’t know, do any design work?

see, i get the thing that these lists are good for seo and people who are searching for the best whatever, but here’s the catch 22: for most of the x number of tips posts, they’re the same tips you see everywhere.  for the x best blogs to read, ditto, you get the same links. upstart blogger posted a while ago his lament for not being able to find a legitamite list of influential female bloggers.  every once in a while i see a list on tips for twitter and think it might offer something vaguely enlightening and am sorely disappointed.

that leaves the similar posts for designers.  these are tools, plugins, textures, stock photography, or graphics that can be used in our work.  and honestly, if you are a designer, there’s a need, a hole to fill for really good sources for this stuff.  especially if you want to stay on the cutting edge and have new and interesting designs.  every once in a while i see the same old price tag i’ve used or the same cracked paint that i found on stock exchange and i wonder just how many times these things have been used on other sites.  so there is a definite need, but half, if not most of the things that get on these lists are really worthless, unusable or incomplete or so highly specialized you’d use it for one client in a hundred.  so give me 5, 10 at the most.  don’t give me the 53 that answered your tweet when you posted a call on twitter.  i don’t have time to sort through all the crap to find the rare diamonds in the rough.  i have work to do and kids to feed and not enough hours in the day to spend wasting on these huge ridiculous lists.  there’s something to be said about being concise, and if you, the poster of 100+ of anything can’t break that down into smaller chunks and weed out the less useful or lower quality entries, really, what are you doing for the design community?  what’s the last rule of the rules of design?  good design is as little design as possible?  yeah, that.

Related posts:

1. 50+ Top Design Blogs Highest Ranked Posts in 2009
2. archived blogs
3. 9 Awesome Single-Serving Tumblr Blogs

me:

> Hi–
>
> I have multiple sites running on my shared hosting
> package, and I noticed today that all of
> them, especially the ones using php/mysql scripts
> like WordPress, are having issues.  I’m
> consistently getting Error 500, webpage not found,
> or graphics not loading completely on
>
> arcanepalette.com
> jazzsequence.com
> alhlegal.com
> oldtownguesthouse.com
> gavin.jazzsequence.com
> kids.jazzsequence.com
>
> I’ve had the Error 500 come up before but have
> been able to correct it by modifying the php.ini
> file and enabling php5 handling in the .htaccess
> files, but those measures are not having any
> effect now.  If it has to do with the load
> required for running my sites, I would be willing
> to upgrade to a faster server, but looking at the
> traffic logs, it does not seem like my account
> gets excessive traffic, so I don’t see how that
> could be the issue.  However, as I run my business
> off of these sites, I am anxious about their
> unresponsiveness.
>
> Your prompt response or resolution would be
> greatly appreciated.  Thanks!

them:

Due to some technical issues, accessing your website is currently not
possible. We sincerely apologize for this very unfortunate event,
although unforeseen but which might already be
causing you a lot of inconvenience. We also understand the frustration
you might be feeling right now about this whole issue. Unfortunately, we
still do not have an estimated time frame for a resolution however rest
assured that our administrators are working as quickly as possible. We
are also taking safe measures to ensure that an incident of this nature
will not be able to happen again. Thank you so much for your patience
and understanding as we work to resolve this issue.

so…basically, what you’re saying is there is some kind of unforeseen problem (which, you know, is odd, because usually technical issues you can see coming from a mile a way) and you have no idea when it will be fixed.  i am to rest assured, however, that it is being taken care of by what i’m sure is the most professional team of administrators this country has ever seen who are seeing to my specific issue and it’s prompt resolution of whenever.  thanks.  i’m so grateful for this insight.  your understanding of my frustration is as reassuring as your assurance that this will never happen again.  

this is coming out of your 99% uptime.

Related posts:

1. server is back online!!!
2. more server updates
3. shoutcast server down