As an internet addict, person with more than forty two brain cells and a librarian, I find the proposed PIPA and SOPA bills abhorrent. I'm not even in the US and they've managed to scare me from clear across the world.
There are at least a hundred good, lengthy, expert explanations of why all the various bits of it don't work, so for now I'm just going to link to a few of the major sites that are joining the black out in protest on January 18th, EST (incidentally, LOVE the look of GreenpeaceNZ )
1. I love the Book Depository because it has free shipping, usually cheaper to New Zealand than Amazon's bigger discounts
2. It let me use Paypal
3. I am emotionally connected to the site
I don't care much because:
1. Amazon is probably more interested in owning the business (which offers alternatives in places Amazon isn't very successful) than changing it.
2, I found the affiliate set up to be quite amateur and much as I wanted to promote the site, I was never quite sure it worked.
Sadly I didn't realise until too late that the old axiom about stray cats also applied to websites. Squidoo, DeviantART, Facebook, RedBubble, Zazzle - even little Twitter, perched on the shoulder of your browser. They all require care and feeding, constant attention and minions, bound into servitude.
Take Squidoo, for example.
For the first few months, I innocently tossed a few tidbits - fed it some content about art, got to know it and told it about myself. And then the affection started creeping in, as it responded to my attentions by arching its traffic levels higher and prodding me with comments and little responses. And then you teach it that first simple trick, and it obeys, producing your very own affiliate sale!
Squidoo is like a team of trained horses, all racing along.. until they trip over their own tentacles, flop over, and start squirming in all directions. A lot of learning is involved in corralling unruly lenses - but Squidoo has by far the greatest potential, when it comes to getting it to perform tricks for an audience.
DeviantART Is The Neediest
DeviantART is the sulky stray that ignores you, while you spend months holding out treats, throwing it scraps and begging it to come visit. you constantly count each glance it sends your way, agonising over the views on your page. And then, almost without realising, it decides to accept you through sheer inertia, and you find yourself overwhelmed with affection and neediness.
A complicated and unpredictable creature, you can never predict what it will prefer - the painting you laboured over for hours will be disdained, while the amusing sketch will be devoured with much purring.
Twitter is the Canary...although it grows into a vulture!
Ah Twitter. So welcoming, so easy to look after. The pet every new internet inhabitant picks up on a whim, to keep their other sites company. 140 characters is hardly a big commitment - a tiny little meal! But the more you feed it, the bigger it grows. And soon, you discover that it's lonely and failing to thrive - be warned. Twitter accounts naturally exist in flocks. A Twitter alone is a sad and miserable creature.
So you adopt another to complement it, and hook it up with some friends - and soon you have an entire flock of Twitters on your hands, to keep fed on fresh updates, entertained, and orderly. You have to watch out for the scavengers, the spam accounts, who exist to prey on the more innocent, and brainless, Twitters.
Someone anonymous out there is awesome. Two of my Squidoo lenses just got flooded with visits. I actually though that I was about to have to submit a bug report, because the stats had just been down while they fiddled.
A Round-Up of Evil, Robotic, Rainbow, Sparkly, Geeky and Dismembered Unicorns
Unicorns are classic mythological horned horses/deer/kirin/dainty cloven hooved things, beloved by two audiences. Little girls are enthralled with the pretty, dainty, magical horses - as a quick search for Unicorns on Zazzle and Amazon will show in a scary way.
The other unicorn-loving audience does have its "Pretty horse" lovers, true, but the major part of it has recognised the most important bit of the unicorn. It has a bloody great horn and can stab things. Who is this enlightened audience? Why - the internet, of course!
The internet loves unicorns. They're everywhere. From happy sparkly unicorns being ridden by sparkly, doe eyed, beautiful yaoi boys, to beefed-up, psychotic, robotic killers, unicorns appear everywhere! We love them so much, we want to play with them, eat them, draw them, wear them!
I got an email from ArchMage today about ThinkGeek's tinned unicorn meat - apparently if you want to import it into Germany, you better not write Unicorn on the package. Or meat. Or else label it 'JOKE. Not Real!" ... or include a Deutsch-English dictionary with 'Unicorn: fictional" bookmarked and highlighted! "Canned Unicorn Meat" Gift Delayed at German Border as Rare Meat
And then this evening, someone on Squidoo posted in the forums about the joke 'prize' (of the same unicorn meat) that you get awarded at a certain level.
This reminded me of how many unicorns I've been encountering and writing about lately (mostly amusing), so I figured I'd make a Unicornic Blog!
There's the ThinkGeek unicorn meat, of course - which started as an April Fool's Joke, but is now sold as 'real' canned meat with mixed-up sparkles. Actually, it's a dismembered toy unicorn in a can - reminiscient of the dismemberable Black Knight plushie!
The Sisters at Radiant Farms have dedicated their lives to nursing these elegant creatures through their final days. Taking a cue from the Kobe beef industry, they massage each unicorn’s coat with Guinness daily and fatten them on a diet comprised entirely of candy corn.
If you like the look of the tasty meat and want to serve up your own, well, there's a spin-off ThinkGeek Prime Cuts of Unicorn t-shirt that you can buy - ideal as a guide for serving up a nice serving of prime love-filled unicorn steak and avoiding the slightly tasteless, chewier cuts of superglue meat. There's a (rip off?) version on Zazzle, too.
Next up is the flash game, Robot Unicorn Attack. Robot Unicorn Attack is as addictive, annoying and happy and harmonious and harmony, harmony oh looove...
...
Wait, where was I? Oh yes, it's as always want to be with yo-aargh!. Addictive. Yes. Happy rainbow flash game of doom. You can basically sum it up with this graph.
I wrote a lens on it, and that's doing very well, I'm happy to say. Which is how I know that there's now a heavy metal AND a Christmas version coming out/available for iPhones. Basically the same game, just with different endless songs and appearances. There's a Chase Your Dreams t-shirt and a 'loading screen' Robot Unicorn Attack T-Shirt from ThinkGeek out finally/already. There are also a couple of AdultSwim designs available.
The Robot Unicorn was probably based off Starlite - the happy, sparkly, rainbow maned flying horse from the Rainbow Brite cartoon. The pretty horsey with the colourful mane has also been lovingly recreated by artists across the internet.
The designs of Starlite and the rest of the characters were revamped recently, from the pudgy cute little round 1980 cartoon characters, to sleeker, older, prettier, more manga-influenced characters.
OLD
NEW
On the topic of 'pretty horsies', The Last Unicorn has been loved for years, as a beautiful, classic animated film in a time when there weren't so many, and fan art and references to Almathea abound across the net. I've done my part by adding Almathea/Disney femslash to the Disney femslash collection *cackles*
Sadly, I haven't actually seen this famous film, apart from YouTube excerpts and for years thought it was the book The Little White Horse, by Elizabeth Goudge (because I could not fathom a famous book that I hadn't read, much les not even heard of!)
The AVENGING UNICORN PLAY SET is well up there in awesomeness - the Avenging Narwhal is even more awesome, as it impales endanged species (the unicorn less imaginately is impaling people), but sadly no longer available.
There's this awesome animated screensaver from The Truth about the death rate of smokers, which I downloaded many years ago and spent hours looking for recently. All I found were a couple of screenshots, and the original download site... which doesn't always actually work for me! I did finally get it to download (weird browser issues? The site itself? Dunno. But I finally have it again!)
It features badly drawn but apparently content unicorns, that jump back and forth between two clouds, floating in a pale pink sky with a giant rainbow arcing down across it...
... and 30% (or some similar smoking death statistic) miss, and either fall to their deaths, get struck by lightning or crash into the cloud. The corpse then falls to the ground and burns or decays into a skeleton. The longer it runs, the larger the pile of skeletons below...
And on this topic of horrible medical conditions, let us segue into the internet classic, Charlie the Unicorn.
And then there's this mysterious cutie
HELLO my name is the Unicorn of your dreams
And to round off, have some general unicorn art and linkage
And I've been writing this for about three hours (admittedly, while being distracted by Eufloria) so I'm going to suddenly stop, with no real conclusion now.
edit: And now, of course, there are the unicorns of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
SheToldMe is the only place I've ever earnt any AdSense money - about $1.20! (not that I use it much). It's a good site to get extra linkage, and often the STM link will appear in Google when my actual link doesn't.The internal search is pretty screwed, though. SheToldMe gives you certain ads on the page, and you just hope those are the ones people click on. I still use it, it's a pretty solid site, and very tightly focused.
Anyway, the same guy who created SheToldMe has also created the very new Best Reviewer which gives you 100% of adsense earnings from one ad. I also like the concept of it - rather than just a blurb and a link, you write a 'Best Of..." list and fill in with links. So niche writers should do well here!
...It is very new, I must stress this, and I stress this for two reasons. Firstly, it's untested, although based on SheToldMe, it is both safe and fairly solid, although not necessarily a huge earner. Secondly, the Top 100 list only has about fifty articles written!
An internet artist's place to write.
will show in a scary way.
).
