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toadminako · 2 years

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I recently noticed that on the WWDITS Writers Guild of America Page...

they are now listing the writers for each episode of season 4, but not the episode titles. So being the mentally-well person I am, I cross-referenced the leaked episode titles with the writer(s) on each numbered episode, then I noted some thoughts on the content of the episodes and what past work the writer has done. I think it gives us some idea of what to expect from the tone and style of each episode. Details under the cut:

DISCLAIMER 1: Do keep in mind that just because certain people are credited as the “writers” of a given episode, it’s still likely that everyone in the writers’ room - staff writers, script editors, the producers, showrunner etc - contributed. Nevertheless, the credited writer can give you some idea of what to expect.

DISCLAIMER 2: I make some (probably ill-advised) statements of what I think the strongest and weakest episodes were so far. This is of course just my opinion.

Anyway! let’s have a look at the writer credits…

1. Reunited

· Written by: Stefani Robinson & Paul Simms

The only episode Robinson has a writing credit on this season. Maybe due to concurrent work on Atlanta? We don’t know much about the content of the episode, other than the vamps return to Staten Island and the house lies in disrepair. I expect a lot of flashbacks to what they’ve been doing over the past year. Being showrunners/executive producers, Robinson and Simms will tend to handle the plot-heavy episodes and establish the outline for the beginning and ending.

2. The Lamp

· Written by: Wally Baram & Aasia Lashay Bullock

Don’t know either of these writers as they seem to be new to the show as of season 4. They’ve apparently worked on Upload, Space Force, Sprung and Betty. All shows I’m not familiar with! However, the leaked scripts from the episode did make me laugh. This is the one where Nandor employs a Djinn to bring back one of his wives and do er… other things too.

3. The Grand Opening

· Written by: Sam Johnson & Chris Marcil

Very likely the “Nadja opens a Nightclub” episode. This writing duo previously wrote “Collaboration” (some OOC moments but a pretty funny and quite Nandermo-y episode) and “The Cloak of Duplication” (a very funny and arguably the first 100% Nandermo-y episode). They have a lot of successful previous work on Frasier, Beavis and Butt-head, Daria, How I Met Your Mother and The Adventures of Pete & Pete. Johnson is also an executive producer on the show who has co-written episodes with Robinson and Simms.

4. The Night Market

· Written by: William Meny & Paul Simms

Meny was actually one of the Story Editors on Our Flag Means Death as well! His previous credits are “Witches” in S2, one of my favourites, and “The Chamber of Judgement” in S3, which I think was one of the weaker episodes though Derek’s return and Guillermo’s gaslight gatekeeping girlbossing was hilarious. What we do know about this episode is that it’s the one that features Guillermo’s family somehow, and Simms says it’s their most ambitious episode yet in terms of the scale of the supernatural creatures involved.

5. Private School

· Written by: Ayo Edebiri & Shana Gohd

Ayo Edebiri appears to be a newcomer to the show, having previously worked on Big Mouth, Dickinson and Sunnyside. Oddly enough Shana Gohd wrote both “Colin’s Promotion”, which is my personal favourite of whole series, and “The Siren”, which is my least favourite. I do think she writes Colin Robinson exceptionally well. This must be the episode the leaked “Child Colin goes to school” script is from. I can’t wait to see how they use special effects to accomplish this.

6. Pine Barrens

· Written by: Sarah Naftalis

The legend herself who wrote “The Curse” & “The Casino”. Harvey has mentioned he particularly likes how she does Guillermo’s character voice, and I’m inclined to agree. It seems like this episode will involve Seaniiiiiiiie going to a hunting lodge with the vampires, and the Jersey Devil might show up. It’s also probably named after a very famous episode of The Sopranos, so I can’t wait to see what they do with that.

7. Go Flip Yourself

· Written by: Marika Sawyer

We know pretty much nothing about this episode as far as I can tell. [Guillermo voice] What I CAN tell you… Is Marika Sawyer wrote “The Orgy” and “Resurrection”, two of my personal favourites (though I know some people don’t like Resurrection very much) as well as penning “Gail” and having a co-writing credit on “Farewell”. She seems to have a tendency towards goofy sex jokes which I appreciate. She was a very well-established writer on SNL amongst other shows before working on WWDITS.

8. Freddie

· Written by: Jake Bender & Zach Dunn

WE KNOW ALL ABOUT THIS ONE, PRETZELS AT THE READY. These fellas wrote “Brain Scramblies” and “The Escape”. Two pretty-darn-good-but-not-the-absolute-best episodes IMO. Maybe it’s of interest that the guys who gave us The Slap are also giving us the Freddie episode... Who knows?

9. The Wedding

· Written by: Sam Johnson & Sarah Naftalis & Marika Sawyer & Paul Simms

Recent reveals to the press suggest this will finally be Nandor marrying whoever his wife candidate turns out to be, along with Guillermo as his best man. Regular writers Johnson, Naftalis and Sawyer make a return here to write with Simms. That suggests to me that this will indeed be a big, plot-heavy episode. Eeeeee!

10. Memories

· Written by: Paul Simms

Another episode that we know nothing about this other than that it ends on a cliffhanger and some of it might have been shot on a wet set, but right now showrunner Paul Simms is the only one credited, so it’s probably a biggie one way or another.

#just food for thought really #stop trying to make me normal about this show #you can't make me #i will take an unhealthy interest in every aspect of it #wwdits #wwdits s4 #wwdits s4 speculation #wwdits s4 spoilers

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ladystylestores · 4 years

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How to Keep Your Blog Afloat During COVID-19 • The Blonde Abroad

If you’re like me and your blog brings in a significant portion of your business’s revenue, this can be a really hard time for us all — it’s really important to take a look at what’s changed, determine how you can pivot your strategies, and continue to support your business over the coming months.

I’d like to preface my thoughts by saying that most of these tips are focused on income-generating blogs, so if you make the bulk of your blog revenue through ad revenue, affiliates, or converting your audience to product sales, these tips are more likely going to relate to you.

But even if you’re just starting out, it’s a really good education on what to expect from the business side of running a blog and turning it into an income.

Here’s how I’m keeping my blog afloat during this time!

Blog and Social Media Performance

Obviously, because fewer people are searching for travel and destination-specific content right now, my blog traffic is down — and with that comes fewer users on my site, less revenue from ads, fewer product sales and less affiliate income. You might notice that your blog is producing less passive income as well.

Here are some things I’ve personally noticed on my own platforms:

Instagram Stories Engagement: Increased

Instagram Posts Engagement: About the Same

Open Rate of Emails: Increased

Blog Readership: Decreased

Pinterest Viewership: About the Same

Traffic Referrals to Blog from Social: Increased

My takeaway?

More people are on their phones, scrolling Instagram and opening emails, meaning they’re still looking for sources of information, entertainment and inspiration, but they’re not actively looking for travel content, which makes sense given the travel restrictions and uncertainty.

So, with that, I decided to use this time to make some changes to my blogging strategies to ensure that I’m still able to support my business with revenue (and pay my team), as well as to pivot my content strategy to build out more content around non-travel topics and keep my readers happy and entertained!

We’ll get into all these strategies more, below!

Look at your “1-month” vs “2020 YTD” Google Analytics traffic to compare.

Take Time to Analyze

In my personal experience, I saw a huge drop-off in traffic starting in early March — at first, I didn’t understand why, but when the pandemic lockdowns started to reach Europe and the US, where the majority of my audience is based, it became crystal clear.

If most of your content is travel-related, there’s a good chance you experienced a drop as well, and this is understandable given the circumstances. Since no one can travel right now, wanderlust and bucket list type searches aren’t as prominent.

Here’s my blog traffic from January through April, for reference:

My traffic has basically been cut in half or, on some days, down to a third of my normal traffic.

So, going back to the idea of “pivoting” your strategies, take some time to review your top traffic and see which pages or posts are still getting views. Your analytics will tell you pretty deeply about what things have changed and stayed the same.

Typically, I have a pretty standard list of my top 10 pages that are consistently getting the most views and clicks on my blog.

That’s because those top-traffic pages rank on Google or do really well on Pinterest, and lead to a constant flow of referral traffic. But, now that people’s search habits have changed with the times, I have whole new content showing up on “top”.

At the moment, most of my traffic is generated from more home and lifestyle-related posts.

These top-pages are still getting the most views (no changes):

About Me: Readers are still interested in my story and the “how” and “why” behind The Blonde Abroad

Home Page: New users are still finding my website from other places (although fewer than before)

Start Here Page: There are still new users coming across my website (although fewer than before)

Destinations: Of course, there will be some people still looking for information on future trips (although fewer than before)

These pages are getting fewer views (compared to “normal”):

All travel guides

Any destination-specific content

These pages are getting more views (compared to “normal”):

So, take some time to analyze your own traffic.

The main things you want to analyze are:

How much the volume of traffic has been impacted?

Where users are landing on the site (ie: certain pages, posts, etc.) and if and how that has changed?

User behavior on your site — consider questions like: Are users spending more time on your site or less? Are they reading more or fewer pages?

What type of content are they looking at now compared to before the traffic drop?

Now, let’s dive into what “new” content we’re creating that’s killing it!

New Content

Normally, we have a pretty standard content creation schedule which includes tons of travel guides. It’s definitely very heavy on the travel theme, but given that most of the world is on lockdown, we’ve decided to share more lifestyle content and things to do at home—in anticipation of what the next 6-12 months will look like for travel.

Luckily, I’m quite confident that we can carry on with a majority of lifestyle content for the time being and still engage my readers.

We’ve seen a nice spike in interest for content like comfy clothes to wear around home, things to do to stay entertained and manage stress during this time, and the global recipes we’re sharing.

Here are some of my top lifestyle posts that we’ve created during lockdown:

What I’d recommend for new content for the new few months is content that brings in some form of affiliate revenue. Include lots of shoppable moments. Consider what your audience is doing right now. If you don’t know, ask them! Most things ‘from home’ are going to do well!

So, take this time to explore other ideas or other pillars of content that you might not normally focus on!

Improve Existing Content

I’m personally experiencing crisis fatigue and struggling to put my head down and be productive.

Are you feeling this, too?

If you’re struggling with coming up with new ideas, one of the first productive things you can do is to improve old content and those newly high-ranking pages.

Maybe the copy is outdated since you wrote it, or old photos need to be optimized. Or perhaps you need to fix up the grammar and incorporate more internal links to newer content on your blog.

My suggestion: Go through your highest-traffic pages and posts, in order of page views, and make sure they’re the best they can possibly be.

Here are my tips on revamping existing content so it’s optimized for user experience and SEO!

1. Optimize Images for Retina Display

I started blogging 8 years ago and never resized my images. FAIL. Huge images slow down your site. It’s SO important to upload correctly sized images.

To find an optimized image size for your blog post: Open a blog post, right-click, and press Inspect—the ‘display’ size of that image is what’s shown (ex. 300x500px). For retina display screens, you’ll want to upload an image 2x that (ex. 600px wide) and under 300kb.

Here’s a screengrab of my photo Export settings in Lightroom for reference:

2. Is Your Title Engaging and Optimized with SEO Keywords?

Yoast’s Blog and Backlinko are great resources for learning the basics of SEO and implementing them. Be sure to incorporate searchable phrases and words throughout the post and update the title to something more engaging, if necessary.

For example, I had some blog posts from 2011 and 2012 that were written in more of a diary format with titles that no one was ever going to find through a search engine, so I updated those types of posts to include more itinerary information and more tangible tips for travelers.

Rather than drafting all of your old content, you might consider ‘re-vamping’ an older article. For example, you can take a “My Experience in Prague” post and transform it into a high-ranking “How to Spend 48 Hours in Prague” guide with just a little SEO research and some edits to the copy!

Articles that have been live longer tend to rank higher, so editing an existing post is sometimes better (if you have a good base) than starting from scratch.

The next section is all about SEO, so if you’re not well-versed, don’t worry — I’ll dig deeper next!

3. Quality of Imagery

Make sure your images are engaging and high-quality. If you don’t have your own photos, check out royalty-free image databases like Unsplash or free stock photo websites. Create engaging Pinterest graphics, too!

Platforms like Canva Pro offer tons of designs and tools to help you create beautiful graphics if you’re not familiar with Photoshop just yet.

Since we’re not our exploring at the moment, it’s a great time to improve your manual photography knowledge or step-up your flat lay photo game!

I put together these guides so you can up your photo game:

4. Update the Copy

If the information in some older blog posts is no longer as useful or informative as it once was, take this time to update outdated information.

For example, maybe a product you recommended last year is no longer available, or the price you paid for a food tour is not the currently advertised rate, readers will appreciate the most up to date information, and so will Google.

Take this opportunity to improve the readability of your older blog posts by breaking up large chunks of copy into smaller, easy to read sections, or bullet-point lists, for better user experience.

If you make substantial changes, you can add the updated date at the top of your blog post (ex. Updated May 12, 2020)—Google Iikes to crawl content for when posts were last updated, which can help your content’s rankings.

5. Link Out to Other Content on Your Blog

Make sure it’s easy for readers to what they’re looking for! Usually, if a reader is engaging with one of your posts, odds are they would love to read more about that topic — so you need to make it EASY for them to find more of this related content within seconds.

That’s easily doable by integrating more internal links to related content in your posts.

Helpful Tip: All links to external sites should “open in a new window” and any internal links (other pages and posts from your own site) should open in the same window.

All of these little things can help improve your user experience, increase page views and the time readers spend on your site and can help with page loading speed (when you optimize your images).

Set your goal to revamp and update 2-3 posts a day if you’re not creating new content. If you’re like me and have thousands of articles on the site, it might have been a while since you’ve last reviewed some of your old content!

SEO + Keywords

If you have a little bit of savings or budget and are heavily dependent on your blog for your income, an SEO audit is a great resource to have a professional analyze your site for improvement. This could be a great time to have a professional take a look and give you feedback on improvements you can make across your website.

While it’s pretty pricey, it’s an investment in your business, and the changes that he recommended to me helped to generate more page views and income across the board. It’s very helpful to have someone guide you through the whole process and give you actual steps to take to improve your SEO.

If you’re just getting started with SEO, this SEO Simplified Course was put together by my friend, Sam, who is an expert in the field. I also recommend him for the SEO audit.

If you want to DIY, here are some tips:

If you’re not using an SEO plugin, start there!

Yoast SEO makes it so easy to improve your blog post and pages’ rankings in Google Search and is the go-to SEO plugin for WordPress. They also have tons of resources if you’re just learning about incorporating SEO throughout your blog.

You can also verify your Pinterest account through the plugin.

One of the most simple and free ways to analyze your existing content is to use KeySearch’s keyword check. With this tool, you can find out which keywords are sending users to your website and how readers are coming across your content when searching on Google.

As an example, for a travel guide to Cape Town, I’ll include longtail keywords like “the best things to do in Cape Town,” “where to eat in Cape Town,” and “itinerary for Cape Town” throughout the post. These are all keywords that people would search for, and by using them, I’m ensuring that people will find my article via search engines.

On Pinterest, take a look at your analytics and see which pins are getting the most clicks (aka, traffic to your blog), and which keywords are used in those pin descriptions.

Doodle & Design

Whenever I have downtime is when I really start to critique the design and usability of my website.

Again, another way I’m stimulating my creativity without feeling that sort of “productivity fatigue” is by doodling and creating custom graphics for my website. I decided to work on creating some cute, hand-drawn elements that I could use to update my social media graphics, sidebar elements, and more!

Take this time to create some new, fun templates for your social posts, so you can work with those in the future — and so you don’t have to recreate the wheel every time.

If you’re using a template for WordPress, one of the easiest things you can do, aesthetically, is to enhance your blog (sidebar, homepage, etc.) with custom graphics that send readers to different pieces of content.

Is a full rebrand in order? Maybe not. But now is the time to start looking at the appearance of your blog and tweaking things that you’ve been wanting to.

User Experience should be the #1 priority for any blog!

How is Your Blog’s User Experience?

The most important thing to consider is what the experience is like for any reader who stumbles upon your website.

How quick and intuitive is it for a user to get the information that they’re looking for?

Some of the things I’ve worked on over the past month are easy updates, and good ways to improve overall engagement.

Test Your Search Bar

For example, if I type in ‘Cape Town’ into the search bar, what comes up? Is it the content that I want to pop-up? Is it relevant?

If your search tool isn’t giving you the results you’d like, try the SearchWP plugin — it’s more intuitive than any other search bar plugin I’ve used, it’s inexpensive, and you can even set your own parameters based on your content to improve the user experience.

It’s also a great idea to reference the analytics from the plugin and see what people are actually searching for on your website — you can use that to create a plan to either update those pieces of content and/or add new relevant content to satisfy that topic!

Link to Related Content

Make sure to crosslink your content! If a reader is scrolling through my post on “The Top Things to Do in Cape Town”, I want them to also see The Ultimate Guide to Cape Town, A Guide to Driving the Cape Peninsula, and Where to Eat in Cape Town linked throughout that article—and for those posts to just be one-click away.

I want to drive the user to my most comprehensive pages where I know they’re going to spend more time digesting my content!

When you start to build out a lot of content, older posts can start to get buried—so you’ll want to create a system to prevent this, and ensure that your older, but related, content is just as discoverable and easy to find as the newer posts.

Work on improving your posts’ layout and internal links so users can find what they’re searching for, and ultimately, spend more time on your site.

Whether you manually add a “Read Next” section with text links to your related pages or use a plugin to generate a carousel of related posts at the end of a post, there are quite a few ways you can make sure users are seeing all of your content on the topic!

Add in Opt-In Monster Pop-Ups

I hate pop-ups as much as the next person. So, instead of having it flash across the screen and have a generic sign up for my newsletter, I’ve added pop-ups or “slide-in” graphics that are curated depending on the content the user is looking at.

This is a strategy to keep readers on my blog longer, increase my page views, and ultimately increase my ad revenue while adding to a user’s experience. Additionally, this can help direct your readers to specific content that makes you money (think: affiliates, products, presets, and more).

Consider OptInMonster slide-in pop-ups that are low profile and that you can easily customize — I choose to have mine slide-in from the bottom of the browser.

It takes a bit of legwork to get the graphics designed and organized, but the process with OptInMonster is quite easy, and as you can duplicate pop-ups to different pages with just a few clicks.

For example, some of the popups I have are:

Promotion for Presets (income-generating)

Free Lightroom Editing Guide (to gather email subscriptions)

Read Next Posts and Travel Guides (improves user experience and driving people to content)

Promotions for my Products and Travel Shop (income-generating)

Ad Revenue

I’ll be blunt, I’ve seen my website’s ad revenue drop by about 1/3. This has a lot to do with a drop in overall traffic, but it also has to do with what advertisers are paying for now — many have reduced their budgets across the board.

Regardless of who you are, you’ll be seeing a drop in ad revenue at the moment.

That being said, I’ve always been quite conservative about how many ads are on my site and the type of ads that are displayed.

But since ad revenue is a big income stream for me, in order to compensate for the decrease in traffic, I’ve pretty much doubled the number of ads on my site and allowed for more video ads which are higher paying.

They can be slightly more annoying for the user, but I think most folks are understanding about trying to keep my blog afloat and changing tactics.

Weekly Newsletter

I am continuing to send out my weekly newsletter, and continue to add that personal touch to what we’re doing — checking in with my readers has been really important to me, and well-received from the community. People seek that sense of normalcy, even if it is just a consistent email every week!

If you haven’t ventured into the newsletter world before—now might be a good time to start focusing on your email list and sending some love to your own community.

Want to see what my newsletter looks like? Sign up for it here!

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What things have changed for you? How are you adapting?

I’d love to start a conversation about business strategies during this time. Let me know in the comments below!

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pinelife3 · 7 years

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Montezuma 2EEE

This is MF DOOM on the Jake One track 'Get 'Er Done':

Make no mistake son, it's Jake One, he makes beats well like I likes my steaks done with sauteed onions and hella worcestershire, a gush of beer to wash it down.

First of all, whew that internal rhyme! Worcestershire//gush of beer. Yes! I feel like only MF DOOM can do this shit. I read a really interesting write up on MF DOOM from Ta-Nehisi Coates recently. Coates seems like the nicest guy ever - he's so smart but also completely unpretentious. He writes for Marvel and The New Yorker and seems to easily move between those worlds. (I was in a comic book shop today and feeling kind of out of place but the bald, bearded goth guy behind the counter was super nice, and declared the book I put on the counter an “awesome read” and then he recommended some other stuff to me as well. This is a wildly irrelevant anecdote - was just thinking about comics.) Anyway, Coates talks about DOOM, but also his own experience as a hip hop fan:

I kept the assembled works of Wu-Tang Clan on repeat and stewed, convinced that somewhere around 1998 hip-hop had run out of things to say. I was not alone. Disaffected music fans began to refer to the halcyon days of the eighties and nineties—when every rapper had a d.j., and label owners didn’t vamp in videos, confusing themselves with artists—as “the Golden Era.”

We were the kind of fundamentalists that haunt every genre of popular music. By the end of the nineties, we had started seeking a sound that offered something other than guns, girls, and drugs. Some of us found neo-soul. Others got lost in our parents’ jazz records. And still others were radicalized and turned to U2 and Björk.

Not to be picky, but I feel like Wu-Tang talks about guns, girls and drugs plenty. But they also talk about the Shaolin, martial arts and poverty and I guess that's the difference. Anyway, I never knew why DOOM wore the mask, but he says:

I wanted to get onstage and orate, without people thinking about the normal things people think about. Like girls being like, ‘Oh, he’s sexy,’ or ‘I don’t want him, he’s ugly,’ and then other dudes sizing you up. A visual always brings a first impression. But if there’s going to be a first impression I might as well use it to control the story. So why not do something like throw a mask on?

Huh. This other musician I like, Brock Berrigan (he makes really nice beats -you should check him out), always wears a chicken head mask - possibly for reasons similar to DOOM's. For me, that reasoning doesn't check out though, because aren't people obsessed with unmasking? I guess if nothing else it creates an iconic image around your act without that having to literally be your face the way it is with most other artists. ANYWAY, I guess lyrics don't need to be technically amazing like DOOM's to be entertaining - this dude Open Mike Eagle has some good lines. From his track "Ziggy Starfish (Anxiety Raps)":

I log into my Twitter page And start bending over like Gollum This dumb cred is like crack rock And I never seem to hit bottom

Sweet Gollum reference - I had to look this one up. The "bending over" kind of threw me: I thought he was maybe saying something about hoes on social media but then why would he be bending over? Then I thought maybe he was saying he was gay and hoeing on social media himself but it still seems weird to invoke Gollum in that context, right? I like Gollum as much as the next person (i.e. a lot), but I would not be super keen to draw comparisons between his appearance and my own (although we do share the same sickly pallor and blue eyes - plus, I too have spent many years living in a cave). According to Rap Genius (and the line's context - I am truly an idiot for not getting it sooner. Maybe I just wanted it to be something sexual to do with Gollum) he's just saying that he's addicted to Twitter and the praise/attention it affords him, similar to how Gollum is addicted to the ring (and crouching).

From age 18 - 21 I was super into Fleet Foxes (I think they hold up. They're pretty irresistible, right?). They have this song "Montezuma" which finishes like this:

Oh man what I used to be Montezuma to Tripoli Oh man oh my oh me

I guess I'm an idiot because when he sings "Montezuma to Tripoli" I always heard "Montezuma 2 Triple E" and imagined it stylised like this: Montezuma 2EEE. Tripoli obviously makes more sense but it never even occurred to me that he was saying that. I thought he was referring to something mysterious and abstract. (Writing it out like EEE makes it look like a bra cup size. I don't know if they do triple cup sizes (they do!). Even doubles make no sense to me. Okay, so I've quickly Googled it. If you're curious: it turns out that a double or triple letter cup size indicates that the boob being cupped sits somewhere between two cup sizes - so a DDD breast is bigger than a DD breast which is bigger than a D breast, and all of them are smaller than E. That's what this website says anyway. But this whole framework really falls down with the AA cup, because a AA is smaller than an A. It should at least be consistent. I've been wearing bras for years (big shot coming through) and am only now learning about all of this. To be honest, I am incredibly guesstimate-y with my bra shopping: band size is pretty consistent but cup size swings wildly across the alphabet. Should probably get fitted but I feel awkward being fondled by a shop assistant. Plus, it's not like I walk into a bra shop and immediately think that the shop attendants have great breasts - why should I take their advice?)

Montezuma 2EEE: I imagined some weird website which was techy and totally opaque to me, but also somehow involved Aztec emperors. I kind of want to make a weird, pointless website ("isn't that what this blog is, Kath?") because I have pinelife.net and nothing is happening there - I post all my Pinelife blog posts there too (which I know is a real waste of effort - my time is worth nothing so I don't mind wasting that) but I kind of prefer Wordpress' text editor to Tumblr's so it has that advantage. I found this really weird website (please please check it out) a while ago via the House of Leaves subreddit and found it so intriguing and exciting. I don't know why, but I had this insane rush of adrenaline while I was exploring the website. It was cool. Maybe I should make a weird, labyrinthine, pointless website of my own: it'll have shitty navigation, the font and background will be the same colour, possibly other things will be wrong with it too. It'd be something to do anyway. Maybe instead of making a book object I could make a website object - is that a thing? This might be a good way to waste some (more) of my time anyway. I do kind of want to make something. I’ve been bored with blogging for a while. Or, I don’t know - I enjoy doing it and looking back on my old posts (out of the vault: remember this one about cynicism and church? I was so proud of that. Weirdly, my favourite post from last year is this stupid one about pizza which was really low effort) but I don’t know if there’s anything I’ve written in the last year that I’m that proud of. The year went really fast and I feel like I’ve change a bit (or maybe a lot, I’m not sure).

Montezuma2eee.com is available. Hmmm. I already have pinelife.net. Is it greedy to want another domain? I doubt Montezuma2eee is going anywhere (but I’d feel like quite the fool if someone did take it from me - I can’t really be the first to think it’s 2EEE - it literally sounds exactly like it). Anyway, I should play around on pinelife.net for a bit before making the $0.99 commitment to a new domain.

Urgh. I’m an idiot. I nuked pinelife.net and all of the images I’ve uploaded to Wordpress there are gone and I’m lazy and never bothered to upload them to stupid tumblr, I just copied them and now they’re gone. I hate myself. Why didn’t I think for like half a second before deleting everything? Plus, there must be a better way to delete Wordpress beyond FTPing in and trawling through all my folders and deleting anything with a wp prefix. What happens if I just delete everything, like all the folders, and just start from scratch? I’ve forgotten how all this works. (This blog post is a real, rambling steam of consciousness. If I had any editorial credibility I would not publish this thing.)

Hey, talking about me trying to be creative: I was just hunting around my writing folder (basically untouched since 2015) and found this monstrosity I made to mourn the demise of Google Reader (wtf is/was wrong with me?). Jesus I have no memory of making this. Troublingly, I feel very pleased with this thing and its weirdness (obviously if I was genuinely embarrassed I wouldn’t share it here). This would have been 2013.

Also, I won’t post this, but I found an old poem I wrote (lame) in 2012 for uni which is all bullet points and features the word “pre-cum” in the first line. 22 year old me: why?

More? This is the start to a novel I was writing when I was 22/23:

Sirens by the swamp. The river doesn’t move in the summer heat: green carpet of scum across the surface. Two police cruisers are parked on the grass, another blocks the footpath. An officer unfurls yellow tape.

In a local 7/11 the Slurpee machine releases its hold on life and a stickiness of Cola flavoured low calorie slush spills forth. Potato salad is left to putrefy at a hundred backyard barbeques. In a thousand shitty sedans the steering wheel is too hot to hold. In a million armpits sweat prickles through dark hair to find cool air.

The body is partially submerged in the swamp. Obscured by slime and dark water, her hair is tangled in water grass, an eel nuzzles her cheek. From the waist down she is naked, seething with ants and flies. There is a tattoo of a dragon on her hip. If there was a lot of blood it’s now vanished into the mud. Someone has performed a riverside hysterectomy: it was not tidily done.

Sirens by the swamp. Five girls stand in the shade under the bridge: jutting hips, bare feet, iPhones, string bikinis, denim shorts. One pops gum as a police officer asks her preliminary questions. Another discretely photographs the crime scene with her phone. Their families are not expecting them for lunch. It’s Werribee and it’s Christmas day.

****

ppl made a new word for wh@ happened. they said th@ she had been uncunted. 2 b fair it was pretty bad nd even sum of tha sirens said they thought a line had been crossd. dead girl wasn’t even from werribee. actually th@s probably why she was dumb enough 2 go down by tha river

the thing th@ made me haha was th@ channel 10 made such a big deal about her being found by tha sirens b/c theyre young girls and tha news ppl tried to make out like its not a safe town 4 girls nd like girls shouldnt go out alone nd they tried to use tha sirens as an eg of young women in peril. but it was like oh man have u got it wrong. those river girls are bad

honestly werribee is fine so long as ur not fool enouf 2 go down by tha river. th@ is the ao for sirens nd eeeeevery1 nos not to go their less they want they dick sucked nd there future ruined. haha 4 real the news crews + police r lucky they didnt get uncunted 2

#MF DOOM #Jake One #Ta-Nehisi Coates #Gollum #Google Reader #Fleet Foxes #open mike eagle #Brock Berrigan

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