Attack of the Blipverts
Ah, the imprecise voodoo of advertising on the web. Too much, and you lose people. Too little, and your site is running at a loss financially and then people lose you because you can’t afford to keep the domain name locked down or exceed your site’s monthly bandwidth or… you get the idea.
And then there’s the current trend, which is to have something which detects ad blockers and throws up a smoke screen to keep you from making use of a site, either partially or fully. I’m not installing anything like that here, ever. I hate that shit.
Still, I have been forming partnerships here and there to bring some new advertisers and affiliate programs to the site. This keeps all the eggs out of one basket (which proved disastrous when Amazon kicked all of its Arkansas affiliates to the curb about 10 years ago), diversifies what’s on offer (while still keeping it very much in theLogBook’s wheelhouse), and hopefully, will eventually add up to the site being financially self-sustaining again in the near future. Read More
The future of job searching…
…is basically like creating a profile on a dating site earlier this decade.
I applied for a graphic design job which required – REQUIRED! – me to post a “passion video”. Fortunately they described what they meant – sorry, I charge extra for doing O faces on camera – and then I realized…oh wait. I’m doing this during a break at my present job. Um…how to do this without attracting attention? Read More
Whatever happened to the man of the funky future?
It’s been well over a year since I appeared on the (apparently, and very sadly, now-dormant) MarkWHO42 podcast, talking about upcoming book projects, including a book that would be all about ’70s sci-fi, fantasy and superhero shows in the United States, and another book that would cover British telefantasy series (that really turned out to be heavily weighted toward the same decade, covering the likes of Space: 1999, UFO, Blake’s 7, Sky, Raven, and so on). Mark Baumgarden and his cohorts (including international man of mystery Christian Basel, who is now heavily involved in the rapidly-expanding Krypton Radio podcasting network) were enormously enthused about the latter book, and it was a really fun show for me. (I could detour here into how much I wish I had a co-host for my own podcasting ventures sometimes, but that could take up a whole other blog entry.)
So…where are those books? Read More
The Packening III: The Packening Continues
As is generally well known at this point, once my house was mine alone (and my kids), I started taking great strides – well, as many as I could afford on a tight budget – to make the place my own in a way it hadn’t been before. When I was married, there was a kind of clenched-teeth agreement (or at least it seemed that way to me) that, since I wasn’t going to suddenly become a different person and shed all of my interests and hobbies, those interests and hobbies were not to be visible beyond the confines of the room I was graciously granted as a sort of man cave. I never really worked out what was acceptable as decor in the rest of the house, because it quickly became a hoarder’s paradise. (And to be fair: we both contributed to that.) Once she was no longer in the house, I pretty much reversed that, not so much as an act of rebellion as an act of preserving my sanity in the early post-divorce days: once properly cleaned up, the house just seemed big and empty. A few lucky on-sale Hobby Lobby finds let me put my true colors on the walls.
When the Art Of Atari Poster Book came out, and I figured out Wal-Mart had frames all but ready-made for prints of that size for five bucks, well, things just kind of went from there.
Oh, and don’t forget the handful of arcade marquees that weren’t donated to Arkadia Retrocade.
How will all of this play out in Utah, where I’ll likely go from being a homeowner to a renter who’s forbidden to drive a nail into the wall? Believe it or not, there’s a solution in hand for this problem. I’ll cover that in a future post. Until then…all of my smaller wall hangings are ready to be hung on another wall.
The Pod, it continues
For quite some time now, as I’ve continued working on my other podcasts and struggling to get them out on any kind of predictable schedule, my thoughts have drifted back to the site’s original claim to podcasting fame (well, maybe that’s stretching it a bit), theLogBook.com’s Escape Pod. It hasn’t been updated since 2015, which concerns me – a “today in history” podcast really ceases to have much use if it’s not updated. Read More
The Packening II: Also The Packening
Some further late-night packening ensued last night, and just as quickly abated because I was kidless and had an opportunity to actually sleep. But let’s look, won’t you?
Sci-Fi reference paperbacks (small): “If I see further,” Isaac Newton is often paraphrased as saying, “it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” What you see here is just a very small portion of a pretty healthy selection of non-fiction reference books concerning the making of fictional universes, along with critiques and so on. These have been, and continue to be, incredibly valuable resources that inform my own writings on these very shows and movies. And then there’s irascible-but-not-quite-lovable Harlan Ellison’s two groundbreaking volumes of television critique, both very well-worn. (In case you can’t tell, all of these books have been read and re-read to death.)
These are just the small-format paperbacks. There’s a lot more where these came from. A lot. A site like this doesn’t spring up, unbidden, out of nowhere – it has a heap of source material.
Hopefully you’re enjoying this trip through, if nothing else, my bookshelves.
The Packening
Moving time. I hate it. I utterly hate it. I hate it with the white hot intensity of a collapsing supernova. It’s also an outstanding time to hit the pause button on your life and take stock of what you value, or have valued, or what you no longer value.
I’ll admit that I’ve been dragging my ass on this. I go to Utah in early-to-mid June to be with my kids and just kind of start over from scratch. I’m three days away from the end of March. I have April and May to get everything packed, sell the house, and get the hell out of dodge.
I wish I could be like Obi there. But I don’t have the luxury. Read More
New phone, who dis?
Our computer are down, we cannot help yoooooou!