System of a Down
While transferring files for the site overhaul, I found this gem.
I never understood System of a Down. But, I’m not the target audience so it doesn’t matter.
Here’s a little System of a Down ditty I whipped up one afternoon a few years ago:
oprah and fiends
I often do this thing called “testing the bruise”.
“… you mean there could be an entire universe inside my thumbnail?”
That’s basically what the hour consists of.
It completely killed my robot.
Choose the colors of your silences.Remove the objects you’ve attached to your fears.True happiness lies in the distance between breaths.Knowledge isn’t the vocation of happiness, it’s the location of happiness.Wisdom doesn’t lie in the faith of knowledge. Wisdom lies in the knowledge of faith.We become more human when we discover the value of change.You are capable of outstanding if you are capable of understanding.The value of change is priceless and yet change is free.Removing “all” from challenge leaves you with “change”. The extra e is for extra pee.(that’s for those who remember channel j)To lead an exceptional life, we must follow an exceptional path.variations:To lead an exceptional life, we must follow an exceptional leader.To lead an exceptional life, we must lead with no exception.
Life is about the grace of the approach and the approach of grace.Your eyes will only deceive if your eyes are unable to receive.Learning lies in the choices you make with your time and what time makes of your choices.When we are passionate about our grace, we will gracefully discover our passion.Expect the appearance of miracles where you accept the appearance of miracles.
so very cool
You’ve probably seen this:
tater-hole
The first few times I saw this billboard, I would do a doubletake, literally, because I thought the O was an anus. I’m wondering if it’s some very clever ad… You know…the character in the “O” (i’m guessing a guy in a fat-suit doing a modern day minstrel act) is an asshole or something.
Maybe not. Like I always say, I’m an optimist when it comes to others.
But really, if you drive by a poster or a billboard with this ad, I defy you to not think it looks like a tater-hole.
Or is it just the 15 year old nitwit inside of me?
make money on the internet, aks me how!
Hippies will tell you that the big bad evil drug companies aka ‘big pharma’ will lie and cheat and use deceptive practices to sell you their evil drugs but don’t understand that the natural medicines aka poppycock aka homeopathy use the most deceptive tactic which is ‘you will probably get better if it’s not serious’.
So, when you ingest their magical water, you get better. And, since it’s magical water, you don’t feel anything like you do with NyQuil which doesn’t make you better, it just makes you wasted so you don’t care how crappy you feel. Since you don’t feel anything you call it ‘non-invasive’. The truth is, it’s so non-invasive that there’s no invasion. There’s not even an army. I just extended that too far. Sorry.
Where was I? I’m talking about Airborne, one of the most recent bits of poppycock to hit the stands.
They just got spanked after being investigated for their claim that it cured colds or if you took it when you feel a cold coming on, you’d feel better within 3 days.
I’ll get to the cool part in a second, but let’s look at the claim, first.
If you feel a cold coming on… a mild cold, you’re going to feel differently in three days. You may feel worse, but if it’s a mild cold, you’ll feel better. Either way, the poppycock is counting on you not remembering the miss; the feeling worse part, but you will most definitely remember feeling better if you’ve taken something. It’s called a confirmation bias which means you will remember the stuff that confirms your beliefs. You’d also probably allow a couple days. If you felt better after 4 days, you’d give Airborne the credit.
Airborne’s claim isn’t that amazing.
If you began to feel sick, came over to my home and I put on a heavy pair of boots with some dull spikes on the top, hauled back and kicked you in the crotch as hard as humanly (not to be confused with humanely) possible, your cold would be gone within a week. Your cold symptoms would begin clearing up within a few days.
Yes, your teeth would still be chattering from the pain and you’d label my brand of medicine as ultra-invasive, but your wussified little cold wouldn’t seem so bad and it would be clearing up, too.
I’ve digressed. And how.
Airborne is currently shelling out over 23 MILLION BUCKS because their claims are misleading. They’re still going to be able to sell their magic nothing but the word COLD is going to be conspicuously absent from the package.
The ballsiest thing they did was say that they did a double blind, placebo controlled study but the company who did the study was a two person organization formed to do the study. The study was on the two guys who did the study. ABC News says “There was no clinic, no scientist and no doctors.”
That, my friends, is award winning ballsiness!
What is maddening is that if Pfizer had done this sort of thing, hippies would be losing their minds, storming the offices of the FDA (who I’m not a fan of, make no mistake) while screaming “YOU KILL CHILDREN! YOU WANT CHILDREN TO DIE!!! YOU HATE CHILDREN! YOU ARE A NAZI PEDOPHILE WHO HATES CHILDREN!!!” or some other statement.
I skimmed over the messages on ABC until I felt my brain turning to mush and apparently, the presence of ‘Big Pharma’ is, by its very nature deceptive and evil, but when a tiny independent company like Airborne actually do something deceptive, it’s okay.
Sure, Airborne brings in 200 million bucks a year, but that’s nothing compared to ‘Big Pharma’.
Well, here’s my ‘two wrongs make a right solution’:
Airborne has been ordered to refund 23 million dollars. If you don’t have a receipt, you can still claim up to 6 boxes @ 10.50 each.
I am. Maybe you’ll lie and cheat with me. I’m embarassed and ashamed but I think an extra 70 bucks will be nice. Actually, I have a couple of addresses, so it’s probably going to be more like 140 bucks. I think the IIG or randi.org might be getting some cash.
It just depends on how long I GET MY SETTLEMENT!!!! I WANT MY SETTLEMENT!!!
why
Yeah!!!!!!
glamour
This is the glamour of the commercial audition. Much like the viet nam airlift but with middle aged women wearing aprons and hair nets because they think it will give them the edge over the competition for the cafeteria lady part. I've been here over an hour so i think i make money which will never match the humiliation. At least it. Hasn't been raining non stop for as long as i can remember. Oh.
What Do I Know
Email to current web client.
Hello young internet moguls..
I would like you two to mull something over. (No, I’m not going to suggest you don’t sell stuff. I think you *should* sell stuff.) Take some time to toss it around before even thinking about a yes or no. Give it a day or so… Discuss… Call me… Write me…
Also, I’m not going to insult you and write “In my opinion” before each sentence as we are adults and should know that OF COURSE IT’S MY OPINION!!!! And another thing. I figure you know everything I’m saying. It’s not meant to be condescending (that means “talk down to”) but just to.. you know… make points or something.
Ado no further - my thoughts:
What I know about The Internets:
Attention spans are short. Everything is free. Quality is rewarded.
And, as evidenced by the three previous sentences: sweeping generalizations are the norm.
1. Quality is rewarded:
Google makes great stuff. Google hires the best people, lets them work the way they want to work yet expect their products to be better than anyone else’s. Even if the general public don’t like or use a product. If you do any thinking about web services (I do quite a bit of it) and you think about google, you know that their stuff is going to be awesome and will only get better. And, if they do happen to make something that sucks ass in the bad way, they’ll cop to it and either remove it or make it better. They’ve created an empire.
I imagine that this is somewhat the way you’re going to operate your site. You’ll be attracting the best and the brightest and let the crap float away or be improved upon. The “brand” will then be ass-ociated with quality. The folks who make crap will then be too intimidated to approach you and the best and brightest will be more inclined to use you as a web distribution channel.
Thinking about google vs. Microsoft, (who I also admire, actually), you see a huge difference. Microsoft seems byzantine, costly, corporate in the worst sense and bureaucratic vs. google’s streamlined, simple, consumer-friendly and generally “nice” image. It’s even reflected on their web sites. Trying to locate something at Microsoft is an exercise in clicking. Google’s home page has their main feature prominently displayed and all of their other stuff readily available. It’s soooo sweet.
2. Everything is free.
Right or wrong, this is the case. Your site is being built in Ruby, a free, open-source programming language. We considered building in PHP, another free, open source language. The cool thing about open source software is that many of the creators do it so you can use their free stuff to make money. What people who pirate software and music (dude, music wants to be free…) don’t seem to get is that it costs money to create something of value. Even more important, quality is rewarded. But, there’s a difficulty in trying to get what you deserve. It’s a tough PR position. Look at Google vs. Microsoft. Metallica vs. Radiohead.
Selling music and film online is tough. No one’s really figured it out. NBC just left iTunes and as peer to peer software gets easier to work, the average person is not going to see the point in paying for premium content.
I acted in a “series” for superdeluxe. They have budgets (small) and attract good talent. Their stuff is, as that annoying mattress guy says “FREE!!!”
YouTube. Revver. MySpace and all those other online video places. Free.
The numbers in Smut, the industry that created the internet, are beginning to drop because of all of the free smut content online. redtube, megarotic, pornotube and at least sixty bazillion other sites all contain free, current naughtiness of the highest caliber.
Waaayyyy back in 1998, you could make a million bucks a year posting 50 shots of a naked chick a month and charge a 49.99/month subscription fee. The market has been glutted so they’re doing daily live chats, blowjob giveaways and more. (or so I hear. as a mormon child of jesus, I shun all pornography and all of satan’s temptations such as women in general)
Which is why premium content has got to be really, really, really premium.
3. Attention spans are short.
The sites that are the most popular are the ones where you get in, get what you want and get out.
Google: “i need all the web addresses of lesbian goth golf clubs in downtown san francisco”
IMDB: “who won the best sound editor oscar the year i was born”
deancameron.com: “when was i born?”
Lots of clicking around and hoop jumping is a turn-off. There is an entire industry now devoted to making it so the user doesn’t have to read instructions or click too many times.
My point… Finally…
I suggest you start out offering a subscription area instead of a per-unit sale model.
There are lots of reasons to do this. And, obviously, I think they outweigh the reasons to use a per-unit model or I wouldn’t have written this stupid-long email.
You can keep a cache of content. It will make your site sticky instead of people being bombarded with an enormous list of the same stuff each and every time they come to you.
Instead of spending hours and hours setting prices, product IDs, remembering how to tag each film etc. you tag something for sale or not for sale.
Same for keeping track of sales. Say the site earns $500 in february, you make your disbursement equally among your content providers. Ass-uming you planned on paying your providers once they hit a certain amount, you won’t have to keep track of 2 dollar pay periods. You end every pay period free and clear with each one of your providers.
If someone’s not selling, you don’t want them stuck on your site with their stale content. You can keep them on the free area or set them a-sea.
Yes, of course it’s easier to program but not that much. The difference in the time you’ll spend maintaining it will be night and day. Hours a month vs. hours per day.
Once the site begins going gangbusters you move to a per-item model. It’s done all the time.
As a matter of fact… tightcircle was a money-making venture because people grew to love the service which wasn’t even understood when it began so much that $36/year was worth it to them. And that trust from the users to the service was one of the things attracting the folks who ended up buying tightcircle (and subsequently not doing a damned thing with it…)
Subscription will also motivate your providers to pimp the site all the time and provide great stuff. You might want to make the numbers available to them. If they see someone getting 1 download to their 20, pressure will be put on the 1 download guy to step it up instead of the 1 download guy saying “aw screw it… i’ll just leave the thing up there. someone’s bound to buy it someday… what do I care?” I know how gossipy the comedy world is. If everyone’s participating in everyone’s profit, everyone will push harder. Reward it.
So that’s that… Make sense? It’s quite late now, so it may have gone off into a miasma of madness.
affect/effect
I shudder inside when people use language incorrectly. I’m sure I use words incorrectly but since I don’t know that I’m using them incorrectly I get a free pass. Sometimes ignorance is the best defense.
Irregardless: my list of words/phrases that make me shudder.
- irregardless
- aks
- less instead of fewer
- hopefully
- effect for affect
- impact for affect
- impact for effect
- shutter for shudder
Let’s discuss…
- irregardless. there’s no such word. fun to use among others who understand that it’s not a word.
- aks. ditto
- less things can’t be counted individually
- “don’t take less than 10 trojans to parumph” is a no-no.
- “you’ll have less fun if you don’t take enough trojans to parumph” is correct (and true)
- fewer things are counted one by one
- “don’t take fewer than 10 trojans to parumph”
- you will go nuts when dealing with money and time
- i have less than 500 dollars is correct
- i have less than 500 dollars is incorrect if you’re speaking of the actual dollar bills.
- i have less than 500 dollar bills is not correct.
- i have fewer than 500 dollars is incorrect
- i have fewer than 500 dollars is correct if you’re speaking of the actual dollar bills.
- i have fewer than 500 dollar bills is correct.
- it’s similar when speaking of time.
- if you’re not sure which to use, apply it to each instance and the one that sounds correcter probably is.
- hopefully is often confused with hopeful or full of hope. most pedants on the internets agree that the battle for hopefully has been lost.
- this is how it’s often used:
- hopefully, google will hit 1000/share within the next couple of months.
- what’s meant is:
- “i’m hopeful that google hits 1000/share…” or “i hope google hits 1000/share…”
- hopefully can be used correctly and incorrectly in the same sentence. consider:
- hopefully, i’m going to the meeting tomorrow.
- one means to say
- “It’s possible i have a meeting tomorrow and i hope it comes through.”
- but one is actually saying
- “i will be going to the meeting tomorrow full of hope that they greenlight ski school 3 through 10″.
- so “hopefully, i’m reading for the part of dysart in the corey haim production of equus’ is correct if you mean you are auditioning for dr. dysart.
- my brain hurts
- affect/effect will rip your brain out. the general, easy method to remember is that
- affect is to do
- not brushing will affect my breath
- effect is to have done
- the effect of not brushing was my crappy breath
- impact in place of affect and effect looks like it’s a lost battle as well. i think it’s because talk show hosts can’t remember the affect/effect difference and impact has replaced them. the verb impact means hit the noun means a collision . an impact does affect what it impacts, but that must means it had an effect, not that it had an impact. make sense? you hear me, cnn?
- a shudder is your reaction when the cat lady upstairs doesn’t close her shutters at night.
by the way, capitalization is for suckers. i capitalize when i feel like it, okay?
from david lawrence
this is great:
This is a dangerous email for me to send out.
Why?
Because I happen to know a thing or two about how to make money on the
Internet, and I’m concerned that if I speak my mind and voice an unpopular
position, I will suffer at the hands of my fellow performers.Ironically, I’m writing this from my hotel room in Las Vegas, having just
spoken at BlogWorld on the need for podcasters to hone their craft and find
their natural voices - to be more professional at what they do.But…I’ve made my living as a talk show host and talking head for years,
taking positions that, to me, make eminent sense, yet to others seem
counterintuitive. And I’ve also figured out ways to make several millions of
dollars on the Internet over the last 15 years or so, affording me a unique
perspective on what works, what doesn’t and why (thanks, Howard Fine!) -
along with what will work in the future.So, here goes.
I’m saddened and angered that the WGA has gone on strike. I think the WGA
strike, and the approach to these contract negotiations, have been the wrong
way to fight the wrong battle. I think they’ve squandered any goodwill they
had in this negotiation by picking the wrong area over which to have a
fight. And the danger goes far deeper than that, as my other unions echo
WGA’s chants.Let me explain.
No one, I repeat, no one, is making real money on the Internet with
webisodic content right now. I’m always amazed that anyone is willing to pay
me, other actors, writers and other performers to be in webisodics - and I’m
on a fair number of well-known and well-respected webisodic series myself.
Please watch Goodnight Burbank and Infected on Revision3. Save the ones
artificially monetized as a blatant corporate sales tool (I’m happily in
Pepsi/Mountain Dew’s Cyberpunx, taking SAG-level pay), none is making any
money.None.
Few are spending money - actors are working for free, green screen rooms are
begged, borrowed or stolen, cameras and cinematographers are being cajoled
into supporting their fellow performer, but very few dollars are being
spent. Most of the breakdowns we see for these shows are copy, credit and
meals. The rare payments to performers in this space are welcome and
cherished.You know I’m right. You’ve seen Actor’s Access, Now Casting and LA Casting.
It’s all a big experiment, with relatively few real production dollars at
risk and none coming back in return. People are dabbling. And spending very
little producing to receive absolutely nothing in income. Zip. Nada.The income side is just as abysmal. If you’re producing content for the
Internet, for YouTube and that ilk, if you’re aggressive, you can count on a
few dollars in subscription fees (I own ShowTaxi.com, so I see the numbers)
and even less in advertising dollars. We’re talking pennies here. And not
per play.So the Internet’s Emperor currently has no clothes (or food or shelter, for
that matter). And if we’re honest with ourselves, we must ask: why fight for
money that doesn’t exist? And (this is where you’ll have to trust that I
know what I’m talking about) - WON’T exist for several contract cycles.My problem is, I’ve suffered through this righteous indignation on the part
of my unions before. And I didn’t speak up. I regret that.See, a few years ago, AFTRA pulled a similar stunt, negotiating what they
thought was a very progressive victory: a triple session fee for a performer
if a performer’s commercial appeared on the Internet. Great, you say? We
AFTRA performers all make more money, you say?No. Not even close.
It resulted in the ad agencies that produced the spots simply refusing to
authorize Internet play of those spots, and forced radio stations to
drastically change their online automation playback, and to blank out those
spots with AFTRA performances in their live streams with public domain
classical music. So AFTRA performers never got paid that hard fought triple
session fee, and AFTRA unnecessarily burdened every commercial radio station
in America.The current landscape in Internet production of video, audio, Flash, YouTube
videos and the like, is still, and will remain so for the next several
years, a speculative one, and one with no foreseeable income.Why?
Here’s why. While the public loves to consume online content, no one has
successfully gotten them to pay for it. No model has emerged, including
subscription and advertising, that generates even the most meager incomes on
the most runaway popular videos.And when does emerge, like iTunes, it gets called not a godsend, and what
consumers want and are willing to pay for. No. It gets labeled “the ruin of
the music industry” by NBC/Universal’s leadership in their zeal to maintain
outmoded budgets. Slap.This is the important fact: the most outrageously successful videos on the
biggest outlet online, YouTube, generate 7-figure plays, and low 2 and 3
figure *monthly* incomes, with short-attention-span shelf life of a few
months at best, as users find the next darling to virally spread. And no one
is madly clicking on the ads on YouTube pages or anywhere else. How many
times have you left a video playback page on YouTube by clicking on an ad?I find myself shaking my head in rueful concern over next summer’s actor’s
contract negotiations when I see my SAG leader, Alan Rosenberg, sending me
an email stating that “their fight (WGA’s) is our fight.”Let me be very clear. I loved him as the alcoholic lawyer on The Guardian a
few years back on CBS, but here, today, Rosenberg is dead wrong, and he is
endangering our chances to negotiate proper and real increases in our pay
rates and health benefits. He is doing so in favor of chasing after the
Internet market. There is no Internet market to fight over yet. There is no
market in the foreseeable future on the Internet.Certainly, he and others are distracted by the fact that some websites like
YouTube and Facebook have moronic, emotion-filled capital valuations the
likes of which haven’t been seen since the dot-com bust, but none are making
money, and none have the near- or mid-term potential to make the kind of
money that merits those valuations. Thankfully they’re not individual public
companies, and today’s Henry Blodgetts can’t hype them to death on the
markets.Unfortunately, what those websites do have is the ability to take viewers
away from network and cable TV, and what have been very, very lucrative
network audience and ad dollars, but darn the luck…they don’t replace the
lost network ad money with online ad money. And no one running these
websites are telling the truth on that - it would harm their negotiations to
be bought by the likes of Microsoft, Google or Yahoo.No, it’s just the same old romantic dot-com hype the mainstream press has
been known for since they started covering the Internet, cluelessly, in the
90’s. And in the end, the Internet’s really just another delivery mechanism,
another wire, with a more painful-to-watch output point (gather the family
around the computer monitor?), not an incredible new market place.Not yet.
And to make matters even worse, the mainstream media, in their zeal to cover
sites like Napster, BitTorrent and Kazaa with such glowing admiration, has
trained a whole generation of users to steal, or at the very least, expect
everything to be free. That means that if a market does emerge, we have some
really damaging speed bumps in getting the public to pay and advertisers to
pay.That, so far, has been the reality for the folks on the other side of the
negotiating table.Certainly for some producers and writers, they might make money with very
little outlay by making a great piece online, creating a demand for that
creative work via viral success, then selling the series as DVDs or by
creating series that air on traditional channels. That’s self production.
That’s creating your own content, so go negotiate with yourself. Most of the
people producing webisodes now are doing so, hoping they’ll hit a home
run…and a network will notice. That’s not revolutionary at all. It’s what
indie artists have been doing for years on the music side of things.So the WGA, our acting and performance membership, outspoken activist
celebrities and our Guild and Federation leadership are, to me, out walking
the picket lines, encouraging us to do the same, posturing themselves and
our futures over a vast empty wasteland that currently is being experimented
with - to no predictable success.I believe that we are far too early in the infancy of this delivery
mechanism to be defiantly sticking our chins out, demanding money that
doesn’t exist, when DVD sales and on-demand cable plays are clearly
demonstrable and are far more lucrative to producers and distributors, and
from which we should be able to extract a more reasonable percentage. My
advice? Go back to the table, demand to rework the DVD and VOD formulas and
keep an eye on the Net over the next few years, looking for real income, but
don’t throw down the precious gauntlet over it.I believe that if the WGA gets what they want, they’ll find that they fought
over hardly anything, and squandered an opportunity to do something useful
for their membership.And before the conspiracy theories start, I am no shill for the producers. I
believe that you train people how to treat you and how well to remunerate
you - and that we, as performers, are usually woefully underpaid. We deserve
as much money as we are willing to demand and that the other side is willing
to pay.But in saying all this, I fear that some of you will shun me as that smart
ass capitalist Ayn Randian objectivist Ruth’s Chris steak-eating barbarian
who doesn’t grasp the fundamentals of what it’s like to be a struggling
artist. And there, you would be correct, right up to the “doesn’t grasp…”
part of that sentence. I struggle every day as an actor, a writer, a
filmmaker, a voice talent and more. But those of you know know me, know that
I often find a way to success, especially on the Internet.Not, however, as a webisodic producer. There’s no money in it. Yet.
So there we are. What do I do?
Do I keep silent, knowing that if I speak my mind, from what I consider to
be a very informed position of first hand knowledge, I could be ostracized
by my fellow performers? Or do I clearly and succinctly speak up, hoping
someone, somewhere in the WGA leadership receives this message as a forward,
even a “can you believe how stupid this guy is?” forward, and changes their
tactics to deal with the real and pressing issues they have?I’ve made up my mind. Here goes:
I support the troops, but I don’t support the war.
I support my fellow writers’ quest for better pay and better benefits, but I
do not support the WGA strike over Internet production I think it is a
mistake to get wrapped around the axle on demanding monies for Internet
usage. And, I believe that not only should the WGA take this demand off the
table, I believe that if SAG and AFTRA pick up this fight next summer, they
will be doing all of their members, including me, a grave disservice. The
producers will balk, knowing there really, really, really is no money to be
shared, and will not be willing to capitulate. And then we’ll strike, and we
will all waste more time on the picket lines, labeling our employers
incorrectly as being “unfair”.There.
I urge you to pass this on to others in our community. And I welcome your
comments, screams, threats and more at 888-488-DAVID. You can also send your
email to me here or at davidlawrence@aol.com.Thanks.
David Lawrence
I look forward to hearing the tales of the death threats and weeping “what am i going to do!?!” emails to him.
