Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: eConfusion
FVccing gnomes
I hate PvP.
Right now, some of you are wracking your brains because PvP sounds like computerese, but it isn’t. Not exactly. PvP = player vs. player, which you gamers knew right away, of course, but bear with me while I explain it to the non-gamers.
In World of Warcraft, you can live your entire virtual life fighting against computer-generated/controlled monsters. You need never fight human-controlled characters. Nevertheless, the game provides certain rewards for success in the PvP arenas known as battlegrounds. But there’s one problem: I suck at PvP.
I did what any logical 40-mmhmmhm-year-old man would do, given the circumstances; I let my 10-year-old do the PvP stuff for me. He’s far better at it than I will ever be. Trouble is, he made me watch, saying, “Otherwise, you’ll never learn.”
I had already spent a good long time screaming at the computer because whenever I set myself up to attack someone, someone else would Stun me, or Fear me, or Confuse me, or Whatever the Hell me, and I would stand there paralyzed or run around in a daze while the enemy clobbered me to death.
But nothing, nothing was worse than getting pwned by a band of fVccing gnomes. This is a gnome:
I’m sorry, but my life has certain rules, and these sumbitches violate both of them:
Something that comes up to my ankle should NOT be able to kick the shit out of me.
Someone that talks like a Disneyland refugee should bite the dust if I look at them crosswise.
Yeah, that’s it, those are the rules of my existence. So I’m watching my son fight these bastards, I’m not even the one holding the mouse, and I still want to punch the monitor.
By which I conclude, PvP is so not good for my mental health.
D.
The rules of live video blogging
In preparation for tonight’s live video blogging session (8 PM to 9 PM PST, longer if Dean shows up), I’ve decided to set out some basic ground rules for my personal behavior.
1. Do not rub, scratch, or otherwise fondle your nose. No matter what you do to your nose, everyone will think you’re picking it.
2. Floss your teeth before going live.
3. Unless you look like Erin O’Brien (and I know you don’t, Hoffman), keep your shirt on. No one wants to see your hairy man-tits.
4. Do not verbally upbraid, badger, beat, or maim your son, or inflict any damage which might cause Child Protective Services to rain heavily down upon your ass.
5. Try to ignore all the flaky sex-chat folks who come around looking for a good time. Then again, maybe you should lead them on. It could be fun for the others. Hell, let’s have a verbal orgy!
6. SMILE for a change. You are so grim sometimes.
Now go out there and break all the rules!
D.
Don’t make me beg for it
I still need guest bloggers (what did you think I meant?) Pop down a few posts for the details. Don’t miss this opportunity to preach to the foodies, liberals, romantics, and sex-fiends of the blogosphere.
***
Author Erin O’Brien will be our first guest blogger (July 1), and she will kick off what I hope will be a long and esteemed tradition of guest-blogging in the nude. Don’t miss it. And because Erin has a webcam on her blog, of course I want a webcam on MY blog and I want it NOW:
Mr. Salt:
You can have all those things when you get homeVeruca:
No, now!!I want a ball
I want a party
Pink macaroons and a million balloons
And performing baboons and …
Give it to me
Rrhh rhhh
Now!
Veruca Salt. Oh, how I love her.
Anyway.
I was saying, I want it NOW, or at least by this evening. I have the camera and the Stickam account, and I’ve done everything Stickam told me to do, but I still can’t get live video. Maybe it’s for the best, though, because it will undoubtedly scare women away.
Are there any other Stickam-like services out there? Or can someone explain to me how I can set this up without Stickam? As Veruca would say, Rrhh. Such frustration.
D.
Q & A: how long is your comment thread?
Alan writes:
How does one drive traffic to a blog? I started mine to keep the folks back in the ‘old country’ up to date with my tomfoolery in San Diego. Now I’m hooked on Blogging. I really enjoy the comments more than the hits. I see some blogs with loads of comments. How does it happen?
My response, over at his place:
Hi, Alan. You were asking (over at my place) about increasing blog traffic. Here’s a must read article: Don’t Dump That Weblog! by one of my favorite bloggers, Paperback Writer. She wrote this article with author/writer-bloggers in mind, but she gives good solid advice which applies to everyone.
I think you have to ask yourself: why are you blogging, and why do you want to increase traffic? For us author-wannabes, the answer is simple: (A) networking with other writers, published and unpublished alike; (B) developing a potential fan base of folks who will not only buy our books but hype them on their blogs*. For folks like me who live in the boonies and can’t make it to conventions, blogging is indispensable.
If you’re blogging for the same reason that folks used to write to pen-pals (i.e., to make friends with people around the world), then keep doing what you’re doing. Offer a bit of yourself on each post and folks will respond to that. Post regularly. I enjoy your posts about the restaurant biz — I think of this as a Kitchen Confidential kinda blog.
On the other hand, if you’re solely interested in boosting traffic and you don’t care what kind of traffic you get, the answer is easy. Post nude photos. And that’s another thing — use sexual keywords. The mere act of writing ‘nude photos’ in close proximity to ’sexual’ will (once the search engines find this post) generate more traffic. It’s a funny thing, but different words work for different people. One of my pals told me that the words tantric sex drove a lot of people to her site. I tried it, and got bupkes. Different strokes, I guess.
*And (C) practice! If I didn’t blog, creative writing would become a weekend-only affair. Not good for discipline. Now, if only I could be even MORE disciplined, disciplined enough, say, to work on my manuscript during the week . . .
Naaaaah.
More below the cut.
Can someone explain to me
. . . this?
Someone named ‘Apparel’ lifts content from other blogs (like mine), links to those blogs, but puts the material under his byline. On initial inspection, there’s no obvious advertisement on the site. But then I highlighted the invisible stuff after “powered by,” and it turns out this site links to golfnewsworld.com.
Strange, huh? Is this some sort of device to boost golfnewsworld’s Google ranking?
***
Blog traffic is way up today. As far as I can tell, people are searching Google and Yahoo like crazy, but not for any particular thing. That means everyone’s blog traffic should be up tonight. Is it?
***
More later this evening. I’m working on a piece about surgical internship, mostly to remind myself I’m being a wussy* for complaining about my work load.
D.
*Cross between a wimp and a pussy. I tend to assume people know that, but they often don’t.
FYI
No, I can’t be bothered to take 30 seconds to mark-as-spam-and-delete CRAP from online pharmaceutical outlets. So, screw it. The following words are blacklisted:
Celebrex, Propecia, Levitra, Viagra, Cialis
So if you write a comment containing one of those words, I won’t see it. It will die in e-space.
And why oh why doesn’t WordPress enable me to block the email addies of the idiots sending me these spams? It’s blacklist-or-moderate, nothing in between. I don’t get it.
More to come, but I had to get that off my chest.
D.
Dumbass move of the day
Karen wanted a blueberry clafouti for breakfast today, so, loving husband that I am, I obliged.
In case you’re saying, “Huh? Wha?” a clafouti is a fruit pancake you bake in the oven. Or a giant muffin, something like that. You mix the batter in a blender, and then you pour some of the batter into a deep pie dish and let it set up a bit in the oven. Next, you add fruit, sugar, and the rest of the batter. Bake for one hour. Dust with powdered sugar.
I became inpatient with the “let it set up a bit in the oven” step. After waiting three or four minutes, the batter still had not firmed up, so I placed the dish (a heavy glass pie dish, oven safe, but not Pyrex) over a low heat. I moved it frequently so that it would heat in an even fashion.
Floppy defeats Blogger! Woo-hoo!
I’m not sure how I did it, but I managed to import my blogger archives into this new & improved WordPress Balls and Walnuts. For what it’s worth, here’s what I did:
I replaced my Blogger template with Andy Skelton’s template script (the stuff in the gray blockquote box).
Next, I went to my wp-admin dashboard, clicked on Import, and then clicked on Reset this Importer. I guess that got rid of my previous screw-ups, because this time, I was able to click on my blog-of-choice (Balls and Walnuts, of course), and it worked!
Since I’m still feeling siiiiick, I spent the last hour or so categorizing my May ’05 posts. As of this instant, all of the April and May ’05 posts are categorized. I’m going to try chipping away at this, a little each day.
Only one problem importing from Blogger: the photos I had uploaded using Blogger’s photo import tool did not transfer over. Out of laziness, I deleted those posts. Fortunately, I didn’t use that tool very often.
‘Kay, that’s it for tonight. See ya tomorrow.
D.
PS: This should go without saying, but some folks are as dense as I am, so . . .
Make sure you make a copy of your Blogger template before substituting the Skelton template. That way, you’ll be able to restore your Blogger blog to its original glory after you’re done importing to WordPress — assuming you want to do that.
The future is now
Jules White, Typewriter, Photo-Collage
Jake finished reading Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger yesterday, so today we had him begin reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night (upbeat stuff, eh?) He got stuck on this passage:
It is a curious typewriter Mr. Friedmann has given me — and an appropriate typewriter, too. It is a typewriter that was obviously made in Germany during the Second World War. How can I tell? Quite simply, for it puts at finger tips a symbol that was never used on a typewriter before the Third German Reich, a symbol that will never be used on a typewriter again.
The symbol is the twin lightning strokes used for the dreaded S.S., the Schutzstaffel, the most fanatic wing of Nazism.
Jake’s problem with this? He’d never seen a typewriter, and couldn’t imagine how such a thing could work.
Even with ample visual aids, he still didn’t quite get it. I showed him the high magnification image, pointed out all the parts, described how they worked. Next, I took a #2 pencil and scribbled out a dense rectangular box of graphite. I flipped this paper onto another paper, and by marking firmly on the back of the first paper, I left a mark on the second.
“Like that,” I said. “The key strikes the ribbon, which contains ink. That’s like the graphite on this piece of paper. It transfers the ink to the typing paper.”
He got it eventually, but the whole thing proved surprisingly difficult. Now, I’m wondering what’s next. Will I have to buy him a sliderule on eBay to prove to him that, yes, you can work trig functions with a clever bit of plastic?
Go on — I know some of you must have similar stories.
***
In other news: suddenly, I’m the WordPress God. I figured out how to put a frog on my header all by myself! You’re looking at a Dendrobates leucomelas, also known as the yellow-banded poison dart frogs. They are native to northern Brazil, parts of Guyana and Venezuela, and they’re a hearty species, easily kept and bred in captivity.
We don’t keep leucs. We keep blue poison dart frogs (Dendrobates azureus), a frog so beautiful folks never believe they are real until they hop.
Honestly, though, I haven’t yet achieved WordPress godhood. I have yet to solve my Blogger importation problems, and I can’t figure out why other computers besides this one refuse to recognize my password. That’s why I haven’t been able to post in the morning. No, it’s not a cookie problem; I’ve made the cookie settings as permissive as possible and it does not seem to help.
Time for The Daily Show.
D.
An Idiot’s Guide to Blogging
I’d like to thank all of you who have gone out of your way to help me with my troubles — Pat, Hedgehog & Peacefrog, Monica, everyone. Thank you.
By the way — Monica? You beat me:
And now, I would like to share a little bit of what I have learned. About blogs, not sluttiness. Clearly, I have much to learn about sluttiness. I mean, 49%? I’ve never scored 49% on a test, never.
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