–Alison Rosen via Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

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Make your own vodka sauce. Pour vodka directly onto food. Vodka sauce.

Clean your gun with a vodka-soaked rag. Now your gun will smell like vodka when you show it to people.

I was actually trying to find something else, about the singer/pop personality named Poe. But I kept running in to cute old Edgar Allen!

Every year my family and I look forward to the arrival of the new IKEA catalog. I keep the children home from the salt mines, sizzle up a mess of Swede Meatballs (”Swede” is short for “Swedish”), fill the room with the sweet smoky smell of lingonberries and dill, and crank up the Cardigans and Robyn full-blast.

To which all I would add is this:

I’m wearing this shirt today. Sometimes I wear it to make a point. Sometimes I just wear it. I bought it from Shirt.Woot almost a year ago? And never actually read their wonderful post describing it. It’s cool to read it now, cause I just responded to the shirt visually, and textually, without “knowing” what the shirt “means.” Now that I do, I can answer my wife the next time she asks (she asks every time i wear it).

What this world needs is more honest tattoos. . . . instead of that meaningless fantasy tat . . . try UNEMPLOYABLE in big Olde English lettering across your throat. Or maybe cover your chest with the mugshot from your most recent DUI, rendered in the style of Boris Vallejo if that makes you feel better. Or adorn your bicep with a wilted rose encircled by banners reading I’D RATHER BE WEARING SWEATPANTS.

See what I mean?

By a Tattoo Artist named Jamie Toon.

Great NYT articleBrain Is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop - NYTimes.com says: “chronically stressed rats los[e] their elastic rat cunning and instead f[a]ll back on familiar routines and rote responses, like compulsively pressing a bar for food pellets they ha[ve] no intention of eating”

… and of course i know exactly what the fuckers are talking about, fuck. Cue soundtrack, Pissed Jeans, King of Jeans.

Note: preceding video not found on “King of Jeans.” I totally knew that.

In a sense, this thought, which is actually a question, could, I think, be said to lurk in the depths of our art, our philosophy, our scientific endeavors, music, poetry, literature, religious thought, even war and politics. The ridiculous thing is, it is a question without answer; an intractable question; a self-referential, maddening gyre of a question; an infernal, stubborn, infinite recursion.

The question that plagues us, has plagued us since thoughts began to form in our proto-cognitive prehistory, is a simple one. At least grammatically speaking… Yet it seems to be diamond-like kernel — perhaps galaxy-pinning black hole — of every human endeavor (with the possible exclusion of cuisine). It is …

Why won’t my wife sleep with me?

MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM <dir> Tor Browser
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM <dir> MacDrive 7.0.10
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM <dir> Gorean Texts, Scrolls and essays
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM <dir> Gorean Texts
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM <dir> Floola-win
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM 1,123,456 1.mpeg
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM 576 Alibris Gor books order number.txt
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM 30,456 avatar_12345.png
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN AM 9,123,456 trillian-v3.1.12.0.exe
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM 21,456 XXXX's myspace poems and work #1.rtf
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM 1,123,456 wrar380.exe
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM 7,123,456 Floola-win.zip
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM 23,456 hypnomaster conversation 1-12-08.rtf
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM 123,123,456 Imee_Oii.rar
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM 3,123,456 MacDrive 7.0.10.rar
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM 35,456 Equilibrium.mp4.[iPodTVNova.com].torrent
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM 5,123,456 macdrive_7.2.5_en_setup.exe
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM 2,456 MacDrive_7_0_10___KeyGen.torrent
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM 7,123,456 RestrainedLife.zip
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM 16,123,456 SLim-2.1.3010.1763-Release.msi
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM 19,456 The.Golden.Compass.2007.DvDRip.TV.Optimized.mp4.[iPodTVNova.com].torrent
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM 14,456 The_Phantom_Of_The_Opera__2004_Soundtrack___Special_Edition_.torrent
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM 7,456 YYYY's chef letter2.rtf
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN AM 21,123,456 tor-im-browser-1.1.6_en-US.exe
MM/DD/200x HH/MN PM 879 WordPad.lnk
MM/DD/2xxx HH/MN PM 4,123,456 yam-win.zip

Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices … by the illustrious Mr. George Leonard Herter of Waseca, Minnesota. It’s impossible to improve upon or even accurately convey the passionate prose of Mr. Herter, so I’ll let him take it away. From the third paragraph:

“I will start with meats, fish, eggs, soups and sauces, sandwiches, vegetables, the art of French frying, desserts, how to dress game, how to properly sharpen a knife, how to make wines and beer, how to make French soap, what to do in case of hydrogen or cobalt bomb attack. Keeping as much in alphabetical order as possible.”

The got milk? people have done something unconscionable.

I just came across a bunch of these Stax-Volt box sets that I could have for relatively cheap. What a treasure! But there’s one problem, the MP3 tags are impossible! For whatever reason, they’re not auto-tagging from the web, or with my MP3 tagging programs. The darn things just don’t exist. So I’ve got about 3 or four (not quite sure) big piles of really badly tagged, nine-volume box sets of soul music. It’s not so bad, really, just a kind of mammoth data entry project. But MAN, I wish CD manufacturers would offer that their stuff was already tagged. don’t you?

I know a fair bit about this, and I have ethics. That right there, I bet, is my problem.

Thing is, I think to make money posting things on the internet, you have to be an “affiliate” or own a giant blogging network (in other words be an “affiliate herder”).

Here’s why: there are only two real/new money-making opportunities on the internet: a) selling things; and b) bothering the shit out of enough millions of internet people to get a miniscule slice of them them to buy things that the merchants are selling via the internet.

That’s what “affiliates” do. They’re the same thing as the people (who you never see!) who drive around posting flyers and sticking corrugated yellow plastic signs, markered with “earn money @ home” 800 numbers, along roadways. They’re nothing but spammers, if I’m being completely Simon Cowell.

I’ve been trying to make money on the internet doing what I have always believed was the coolest thing about the internet: sharing stuff. Along the way, I stuck in some google ads, thinking that if enough of you internet people came by and enjoyed the stuff I share, I can “monetize” my sharing with little or no effort. In about fifteen years of having google ads on a few sites I run, I’ve yet to make enough for google to actually cut me a check. That’s a mere $100 dollars.

So I started up a few other blogs too. With the thought that I just needed to better target what share on the internet, to attract a more specifically niched type of advertising. My collaborative community steak blog, for a while, seemed like a promising idea. But then it turned out that as large as I wrote “this is a really cool idea, join us!” on the front page of that site, nobody seemed to want to join in to share their own stuff on my page. So I quickly discovered that I had to nag friends and relatives to write their own stuff, remember to take pictures of their steaks, etc. or else I’d have to provide all the content myself.

One guy, in a little town in the corner of the country, with a fairly limited budget, can’t singlehandedly write a community collaborative guide to steak that aims to cover the entire nation of steak dining opportunities. So that dried up, and eventually, after posting bare uncommented links, and stealing from flickr and google image search, that site pretty much died.

Along the way I’ve tried all kinds of different things. Places where I can very easily grab my username, and stick up a bunch of graffiti pictures of walruses, or single out very cool Emily Dickinson quotes with the flick of a toolbar button. And the problem remains: there’s not any great way to elicit enough “views” to make any more than pennies. Unless of course you have a mighty army of delusional robots or chimps or perl scripts to completely overwhelm, or saturate, something as big as google. The way to make money at internet is to yell so loud that there are no other voices; to splatter your wheatpaste and paper over every available surface without regard to the integrity of your “message”; to completely dominate a very large advertising niche, like Sportsfans, by stealing the best talented writers away from their own personal hobby sites that are fueled by passion, and cram them into a corporate standardized/sanitized format that is specifically designed to showcase advertising, at the expense of content. Such blog networks have as their ultimate goal to attract as many repeat readers as possible, without needing to expend too much personal effort on creating content, and to keep those readers long enough inside “sticky” web applications, so that you can say to General Motors, or Gillette Razors “we attract millions of viewers, you should give us millions of dollars.”

Ultimately you’ll want to be acquired by something bigger than you, like the Television Company, for several hundred billion, so you can just quit working so hard. Solo blogging, as a career, doesn’t exist if you want to get paid enough to live. Posting things on the internet is about as important to the ‘net economy as the efforts of a single tree to grow a season’s worth of cherries are to the Fruit Roll-Ups industry. That lovely perfect ruby cherry you just grew will be obliterated in with a hundred billion other cherries, and HFCS and fillers to become a sheet of sticky between two sheets of plastic, inside a box designed around The Penguins of Madagascar.

I’ve learned that in order to turn my posting things on the internet into a supplemental income, I pretty much have to remove all traces of myself and my taste and my discretion from the process. I need to have a thousand “blogs” with a hundred posts a day each, which are all “authored” by a scheduler job, which also runs a program designed to trick other people posting on the internet to post the posts that my scheduler job already posted, instead of posting their own. It’s a pyramid scheme. The point is not to sell bottles of carpet shampoo, but to trick other people into selling bottles of shampoo for you. Having great shampoo isn’t even part of the deal, on the internet. In fact there isn’t any shampoo. It’s traffic and viewership that I’m trying to command, and the plan seems to be to get hundreds of unwitting others to accidentally provide an exponential increase in my own traffic.

So, I’m doing it wrong. I still care about what goes on my internet pages. I look at each one of them, and provide a unique tag or perhaps a relevant caption. I stare at two different jpgs I’ve copped from some kid’s flickr for 90 seconds trying to discern which one is cooler. I’m doing it all wrong. I need to do it with one of those giant concrete injector hose machines, or one of those giant machines that drive along emitting eight-lane super-highways out the ass end. Homecrafted artisan blogging is dead. I’d almost say it doesn’t exist anywhere, at least nowhere you’ve heard of. Sure there are interesting ecosystems, like Tumblr.com, that give lots of people a way to easily share (and rip off) interesting items on the internet. But you should see my Google Analytics from those!

I made nineteen cents last month.

I’m totally doing it wrong.

In other news, the Olivers are a couple of nutters:

The new project comes just a month after Oliver and wife Jools, 34, celebrated the arrival of their third daughter Petal Blossom Rainbow.

Shaving my nipples the only way a real man can…. with black electrical tape.
6:27 PM Apr 17th from web
Boiled a dozen eggs, colored them and covered them in glitter. I then shoved them up a Malaysian man’s ass for the cost of free ninety-nine.
7:53 PM Apr 11th from web
Woke up naked on the kitchen floor next to a dog bowl full of my own piss. Good Friday, where are you?
2:03 PM Apr 9th from web
Pre-op tranny + dong tape + unholy hole + me = a chocolate thunder renaissance
7:31 PM Mar 30th from web

@Carrot_Top who is incredibly twisted, and probably not real

Warning: do not booby-trap your finger daemon, unless you are prepared
for infinite finger loops.