Category Archives: Blogging

what did you do today, raincoaster?

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Shakespeare got to get paid

Today it isn’t so much what I’ve done as what I’m going to do; I’m going to give the keynote speech tonight at the AGM for the Federation of BC Writers. I’m also going to take the opportunity to pimp out my intensive, 10-week online Blogging for Writers course that starts next week, and my June 19th Social Media Self-Promotion for Writers half-day workshop.

Dud my nails for the occasion, too! Sparkly!

Posted an announcement about my new linkblogging service for celebrity/gossip or fashion blogs:

$100 a month gets you a list of links three times a week, minimum 10 links to different blogs. More links, or more frequently, more money, obviously. Every blog that buys into the monthly link service is automatically included in the links, of course, and the more blogs that buy the service the more powerful in terms of Googlejuice and visibility each link will be. Completely custom link lists are also available, but if I’m going to spend two hours looking for links already day in and day out, you’re gonna hafta make it worth my while. Send Viggo with cash.

I also blogged:

Dropped a couple of quite pointed comments, even for me:

  • On Gawker, about Starbucks watering down its high-class image:
    Starbucks hasn’t been dedicated to high-end coffee at the expense of market share for about…lemme count on my fingers…oops, have to take off my shoes and socks too… twelve years. I was working there at the time, and you could feel the “shareholder-driven focus” seep through the stores like the nauseating vapours from an open grave. They still have good coffee, but that’s only because they want to keep the people they hooked with it, like me. They also pander to people with terrible, soy-creme-mocha-chippichino taste, because they roam the cities and towns of this world like lumbering herds of calorie-addicted ATMs.
  • On Ann Hathaway’s loser boyfriend (not that one, the new one) ripping down part of a mural, perhaps because he thought it was a Banksy:
    I like to think that the idiots who tear down/paint over Banksy works spend an eternity in a unique circle of Hell where they are viciously butt-raped by LeRoy Neiman and Thomas Kinkade. [banksystreetart]

Answered about 20 questions in the Support forum.

Threw about 12 items on the Tumblr for possible later use.

Outlined the Vancouver Social Media Club event on the 27th, for which I hope not to be in town, actually, and emailed several places to arrange a venue. And roughed out the announcement, which cannot go out until I get the nod from the venue, UGH, even though the Straight deadline is tomorrow.

Applied to be a speaker at 140 Character Conference, a Twitter conference run by the very cool Jeff Pulver. My proposed topic is using Twitter to initiate offline action in your readers.

Took the exit survey from Northern Voice.

Grocery shopped like a fiend. The shelves at London Drugs will never be the same; seriously, if you’re flexible, buying food from drugstores in the middle of the night can save you shitloads, because they’ve always got SOMETHING they’re trying desperately to get rid of, less than half-price. I’m eating packaged, microwaveable Indian vegetarian meals and canned fish for the next three weeks, it would seem.

Realized the Shebeen Club is NEXT FREAKING MONDAY which means all the invites have to go out via social media tomorrow, and we’ll miss the papers. This is what I get for booking a speaker who promptly takes off for Malaysia. “Pull a topic out your ass” night it is then! Thank god it’s Zombie Awareness month.

Noted that my first post on Sami Salo’s testicles has 666 hits. Hmmm. Does that mean he’s cursed? Or that the devil loves to read interviews with social media gonads?

Bitched endlessly on Twitter about the two drunken hipster chicks who sat in our doorway so they could loudly conduct a “private” conversation. If it had been more interesting than “Oh my god I totally don’t wanna be your friend when you’re like this! I’m not like this? I mean, I’m like this now, but I’m totally not, like, LIKE this, you know?” I’d have liveblogged it. Must. Get. Webcam. “ZOMBIE HIPSTERS OF VANGROOVER” sure to be a Youtube smash!

Neglected (once again) to blog the fantastic Bombay Sapphire event I went to Monday. Oh well, so far I’ve posted it on Twitter 12 times and that’s 12×5500 readers, so I’m sure they’re okay with me taking my sweet time.

Somewhere in all this I went for an hour-long walk around my neighborhood, which is always a rewarding experience, particularly when I run into the kitten I rescued on Christmas Eve a few years ago, all grown up and haughty. And get to chat with the cute guy who works at Union Market. Suddenly, yeah, I LOVE talking about the weather.

Decided on the spur of the moment to do the Shebeen Club press release right now…see ya l8r!

What Did You Do Today, raincoaster?

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Desert Island disc-less

via fleetfootedfox

Nothing much, just:

Posted:

Discouraged a half-dozen or so people from attempting to pull the broken glass out of the door of the office and break in. I have some powerful stink-eye. A junkie kicked the glass door in the other day, but we have bars too, so even if you did scabble with your paws and get all the broken glass and the glass patch and the vinyl patch out of the frame, you’d just be stuck standing there looking in, only with you’re own blood all over your hands, and wouldn’t you feel stupid then, eh?

Watched an old lady get helped out of her wheelchair so she could root around in her bag for her crack pipe, and then watched as she dropped the pipe and the burning crack onto her slipper socks and then tried to suck the crack out.

Declared a moratorium on talking about dead people. Until BusyBeeBlogger pointed out that would give VanityFair nothing to talk about, so I said it was okay as long as the people were dead, fabulous, and not of my circle of acquaintances. Which describes most of the people they write about to a T. Or even an I.

Read Gawker and got depressed.

Pre-posted for the next couple of days. I’ll have to do a linkpost and something for TrueSlant Monday, but otherwise can take a day and a half at least off without feeling guilty.

Realized that, of my top ten posts, only one is less than a year and a half old. And got more depressed.

Self-diagnosed (probably accurately) with this fancy new, imported death fungus (25% fatality!). Have to get myself back to the doctor; maybe I should just camp there? I have every one of these symptoms INCLUDING the one only reported in animals so far. And I’ve had these symptoms for two months now.

Dealt with the post office, the bank, the other bank, Fido, the Sister, the Shebeen Club event on Monday, and American Apparel, who apparently wishes to send the Manolosphere some shoon.

On the plus side, when I go over to Victoria to speak at WordCamp Victoria, they’re putting me up at the Fairmont Empress. Yes, you may now envy me. Oh, AND the afterparty is going to be a gin tasting at Clive’s with a representative from Victoria gin and perhaps another gin which hasn’t been released to the public yet. Gotta hand it to that Dutch Courage: it works. There I was snarking about how you could use the stuff to strip paint and BAM! They ping me on Twitter and offer me another sample to see if it hasn’t improved. That takes courage of SOME kind, for sure.

Victoria gin is the third gin company that’s offered me a bottle, but it should be noted that Beefeater hit me up on Twitter and offered, but never actually came through with the goods. Bombay, of course, did. Not that I keep track of these things.

I submitted my blogs to Zemanta for consideration for inclusion in their devastatingly clever little linking system.

I offered up my services as a linkblogger: if I’m going to spend two hours every two days doing this, I might as well resell the end product: doing so will actually increase the value of each link, as it’ll be coming to any particular post from an increasing number of blogs. So, if you know a gossipblogger who’s got better things to do with his/her time than read and link, let me know. The more people who buy the service, the cheaper it gets.

Checked and re-checked Google and Bing for why they’re not indexing Lolebrity properly: I think it all comes down to this topless Helen Mirren photo. Hell, I even photoshopped out the nipples AND covered them with @ signs: what do these people want from me????

And, of course, did this post.

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New Look for Northern Voice

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Longtime Northern Voicer here (That’s the Northern Voice blogging conference, May 7-8 in Vancouver) ; I’ve attended the conference every year but one, and this year I’ve busted into the dizzy heights of the presenter’s list, which certainly puts me in the upper 50% of attendees. Yes, when it comes to Northern Voice, me luv it longtime.

But…

Is it just me, or does this thing:

Northern Voice Mascot, PedoBearMoose, yo!

The official Northern Voice mascot

Look like this thing:

Pedobear

Pedobear, the one and only!

Now, Kris said something about having some sexblogging workshops this year. I’m just not sure this is the very best way to draw an interested crowd.

Northern Voice Get Your Moose On

On WHERE, goddammit? And how do I get him off?
Oh wai- NEVER MIND!!! I DO NOT WANT TO KNOW!!!!

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Operation Global Media Domination: the Shockozulu Situation

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Well, it started with this: a simple blog post about Twitter, Janet Jackson, Bonnie Fuller, and John Cusack, essentially reblogged (with some edits) from my social media blog, posted to my new True/Slant blog, TheCelebrityIndustrialComplex. The blog I’m trying to get off the ground, the blog that typically gets anywhere between 100 and 35000 hits a day; even someone as raucous as I would prefer a little more stability (preferably on the upper end of that range, especially given that I’ve gotta get 4000 more sets of eyeballs by the end of March to make my monthly bonus).

It was a simple post, I was saying. And it was.

And then it turned into this:

And then it turned into an rt by Shockozulu and then it turned into this:

Yes, almost exactly one month into the life of this new blog, I’ve been rt’d by John Cusack.

And it was everything I ever dreamed it could be.

Carol Lombard

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Promises, Promises

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marriedtothesea.com

Yep, that’s the way this scam works.

Every downturn in the economy causes several things. Maybe even more than several. But the one that annoys me because it shows that not even people who are paid to write and get printed on actual physical paper have anything even approaching an institutional or professional memory:

The fact that every frakking newspaper on the planet comes out with the same faux-callow retread: OMG, Post-Secondary Schools Are Like Totally Ripping Off the Unemployed.

Yes.

Of course.

It’s what they’re for.

Far too many of them anyway, and if you doubt that, you can take a quick browse through Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream.

Which doesn’t make my decision to apply to grad school any smarter or dumber than before, for lo, I am a terrible snob, and I wouldn’t go to some podunk Potemkin College. There are only three schools in the world who seem to be offering the opportunity I’m looking for: one in the UK whose name I can’t remember, Stanford, and Simon Fraser University, which happens to have the new school of Communication, Arts and Technology just about a ten minute walk from my apartment.

And of these, SFU is the greatest, because it’s the most wide-open, the most affordable, and smack-dab in the middle of a community to which I am connected up the proverbial wazoo. I’m not connected to them literally up the wazoo because I don’t like them that way, okay? Okay.

I’ve been told that Stanford has a program for deserving people from out of the country with whom they want to work, and I’d like to think I’m one of those people, they just don’t know it yet. And the UK would be nice, and I’m pretty sure I could use BoJo’s webguru as a reference, and I can easily get an EU passport, what with having been born in France and so on. And god knows, I haven’t got enough paperwork in my life, so here goes a round of rooting through online prospecticusses and presumably interviewing, because when you’re the scholarship applicant, they’re not gonna take a shot in the dark: they want to look in your actual eyes and see if the retinas match with anyone on the Ten Most Wanted list.

Especially if you’ve indicated a preference for distance learning, a desire to collect professors’ home addresses, and you’ve listed a cabin in Montana as your address.

As if that weren’t enough, I’ve also taken on a major role with the Social Media Club of Vancouver, and I’m applying for more paid blogging gigs, as well as upping my post frequency on True/Slant.

Which is basically all my posts tagged WorkLife Balance are ALSO tagged Speculative Comedic Fiction.

Next up, figuring out how to apprentice myself to this guy. I spent a significant part of last year trying to convince local hotels this would be a good idea in advance of the Olympics, to no avail. Obviously, the man has mad hotel-persuasion skillz.

Promises: hmmm, isn’t that the name of a rehab center?

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