My blog

The chefs for Norway’s Olympic team ordered 1,500 eggs.

What they got was 15,000 eggs.

With Norway boasting a team of 109 competitors, the team’s chefs placed a bulk order for eggs from a local store. The order was apparently lost in translation, however, and they received a bumper batch – some 13,500 more than expected.

“There was literally no end to the delivery,” chef Stale Johansen said. “Absolutely unbelievable.”

The chefs have since been allowed to return their excess produce, with Aftenposten attributing the original mistake to a mix up with Google’s translation tool.

Although the excess eggs have been sent back, the Norway team can still expect plenty of egg-based dishes.

Mean Bean Machine gifs for your and your chums!

Then, their policies changed. Half my work was no longer allowed. People left the site in droves. I left too, for awhile. I came back to a ghost town. I still have 25k followers, but I don’t think more than 10% are active anymore. I’m followed by ghosts. Same with DeviantArt, although I was never quite as big there, and I’ve been gone so much longer.

This disallowed half of my work was never allowed on Facebook in the first place, or Instagram, but their algorithms are such that my stuff rarely makes it to anyone’s feeds, and if I post a link to where people could actually pay me for my content, it’s hidden unless I pay for it. Patreon swept my work away to a dark corner where no one could see it unless I personally guided them there. Twitch is so strict you can’t even show bare feet. The death of Google Reader means nobody follows RSS feeds anymore, so I can’t direct people to my own site.

So there’s Twitter I guess, where I can post whatever I want, but again, algorithms. But more than that, I don’t have the energy to build up a following once again on a site I don’t own that can delete my career on a whim. The thought of spending time jumping around through hoops for attention just to have it taken away again has stripped any motivation I had to try.

The internet has been gentrified. All the small cute houses and mom & pop shops have been shut down and replaced by big corporations that control everything. I’ve been making webcomics for twenty years, and at the start, the internet was a beautiful wild place. Everyone had a home page. It was like having a house and people came to visit you and you would visit other people in their houses. Now, we don’t visit each other in personal spaces anymore. It’s like we have to visit each other in the aisles of a megamart. Everything is clean and sanitized and the weirdos who made the internet what it was are no longer welcome. No space for freaks anymore.

People still ask me for advice on how to break into comics, and I don’t have any wisdom because I don’t recognize the internet anymore. I don’t feel comfortable working within its boundaries which seems to be getting smaller and smaller and smaller. None of the tools I used when I started exist anymore. They’ve been replaced by things I don’t know how to use. I don’t think I could break into comics today. 2002 had so few barriers compared to now. You might have started on Keenspace, but you could reach a point where you could break away to your own site and people would go to it. Now, you start on Webtoon or Patreon and I guess you just stay there? It feels so much like owning a hardware store for years and then having to go work as a cashier at the Home Depot that put you out of business. I’m looking at my career trajectory and it all points to being a Wal-Mart greeter with uncontrolled arthritis.

Lord Hater: *trips and falls*

discord call

podcast

documentary

radio and internet radio

music, from any source. without having to download it at all.

music you make on virtual pianos/etc

noteworthy news items (fireside esque, interviews, huge events)

stand-up comedy

rented or borrowed media

any other sound your pc can produce

and with a VCR you could do all of this AND have the visuals as well… but an audio cassette recorder is a good place to start, since they’re small and simple. I would not recommend a boombox, because those are large and nowadays all very, very bad quality.

Now you may be saying “how is any of this helpful, I want a digital file…” here’s the fucking magic. You go into Audacity (free program), and lie to it that the tape recorder is really a microphone. Then you hit record on Audacity, and hit play on the tape, and let it play at regular speed. Trim and export the digital file, and you’re doing gangbusters. You’re cooking with gas. You’re thinking with portals. You’ve won the internet.

Congratulations, you can “pirate”* anything you want, and literally no one can catch you, because you’re not downloading in the traditional sense. You’re streaming to an external device, and that device is recording what it receives. It’s exactly like taping a live tv show to a VHS. This is a very low-key and non-strenuous task for the computer, since your tape recorder does all the work.

now is NOT the time to join a multilevel marketing business.

it's never the time (because they're pyramid schemes) but now is ESPECIALLY not the time, and they're gonna be out in full force trying to recruit people, especially if we start seeing widespread lay offs

If someone wants to offer you a "job opportunity" but won't tell you the name of the company, RUN

if a company requires you to purchase a starter kit, FUCKING RUN

if someone invites you to an "opportunity call" or otherwise pitches this "opportunity" to you, and it's just a whole bunch of love-bombing and motivational speaking, RUN

if you cannot "rank up" in the company without recruiting more people to your team (aka downline), RUN

if you already joined one, cut your losses and quit now. seriously

if your friends/family join them, do not buy from them, even if it's just to support them... buying from people who join MLMs gives them false confidence that they will succeed, and it keeps them in longer, and ultimately they will lose more money, and probably damage a lot of their relationships along the way

99% of people either make no money, or worse, LOSE money, in multilevel marketing. They're scams and commercial cults and the "recession proof industry" marketing campaigns are already well underway, especially in MLMs that are currently on the brink of collapse (like Monat)

don't be fooled. there is no opportunity. it's not a job. it's a scam

(also, watch out for their alternate names... network marketing and social selling are just synonyms for multilevel marketing.)

Eta: if you're not sure if a company is an MLM, Google it. There's an entire database online for this. Search "is [X] an mlm" and if it is, you'll find a wealth of information about how their scams work.