Season’s greetings, and Happy Holidays to one and all! A couple of random site notes:
The Substack thang: As a few of you know already, I was recently “recruited” (her word, not mine) by a nice lady from Substack to start writing for them. Now as it happens, when Substack was first launched I went ahead and established an account there, not really knowing for sure what it was or why I would bother with it. It’s not as if I have an abundance of free time to do more writing than I already am doing at CF, but what the hey.
That said, I’ve spent the last cpl-three weeks poking around in the Substack CP, trying to make it look the way I want it to look, which appears to be completely impossible near as I can make out. The nice lady told me I might be able to make up to six figures there, which Lord knows I could use now that my one-legged cripple status has forced me into early retirement, dependent entirely on the paltry 700 simoleons per month SSI is netting me. Gonna be chatting tomorrow with my friend TL Davis about all this Substack stuff, we’ll see what he has to say about it.
What I’m thinking of is putting out fresh, original, Substack-only content twice a week, maybe on Tuesday and Friday, say. During my initial flailing and floundering around trying to suss this infernal Substack machine out, I just left the “Subscribe” option in its default price setting; I can’t even remember now how much it was, honestly. Still a ton of prep work to do yet before I’m ready to launch; I’ll definitely keep you fine folks apprised as things develop.
The “Happy Holidays” Thang: Nope, it’s no coincidence I brought up the imminent Christmas/T-day season in the opening line above. The annual appearance of the universally-beloved Scrooge Picard holiday theme being the big, fat, time-eating pain in the ass it is, I’ve already started mucking about with it. My intention was to try not to jump in quite as prematurely as I usually do this year, I had promised myself I’d wait until Thanksgiving to implement the changes.
Which, being the overgrown Christmas-happy kid at heart I still am and will hopefully always remain, I’m confident you CF Lifers already know just how unlikely it is that I’ll be able to stick to such an unworkable resolution. Fact is, I smile every time I see good ol’ Picard up there on the masthead of the blog; I check in just to look at him MUCH more frequently than I normally do, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.
But this year may be a different kettle o’ fish, for a very different reason. See, in the Aulden Thymes before Scrooge Picard was even a twinkle in the remoter corners of my warped imagination, I ginned up a Christmas header image featuring the incomparable Bettie Page trimming a Christmas tree dressed in nothing but a Santa Claus hat and her patented innocent-yet-sexy wink—a photo shot by Bunny Yeager, I believe it was, for Playboy magazine way back in 1954-55 or thereabouts.
What I’m thinking is this: if I recall correctly, the current CF theme’s customization settings have an option which allows for header images that swap out at random, between a pre-selected set of ’em.
The problem being, dear old Bettie Claus is definitely NSFW, at least in most business-office environments. Even though the photo is decidedly pre-porn and innocuous compared to even some TV commercials in this far less blushful age, depending on your boss’s—or your wife’s, or your pastor’s, or your kids’—personal tolerance for light-hearted but naughty classic 50s pinup imagery, it could conceivably make trouble for some of you. Which I am quite loath to do.
Tell ya what, let’s try this: I’ll get to work right away on getting this year’s Xmas theme set up, with Bettie up top instead of Scrooge Picard initially. I’ll leave things like that for a cpl-three days, say. With the weekend nigh upon us, I think it less likely for most office-working types to get busted by a boss-head with Nekkid Bettie on the monitor screen. So have a look over the next few days; if enough of you folks are worried about catching serious flak over it, let me know right quick and we’ll just go with old Scrooge exclusively.
1
- Entries
I had to look up the substack thing to see what the heck you were talking about 🙂
My wife was reading and told me you were getting set to make 7 figures. She added a digit 🙂
I’m not clued in to these things but I’ll certainly subscribe whenever the time comes. I hope it will work out. Looking at the website it certainly looks like a good opportunity.
Thanks, Barry. Guys like Greenwald and a few others probably are hauling down six figure incomes, I guess, but they ain’t me. Don’t get me wrong, I am in no way denigrating myself unfairly here; I DO have a good following, but at the same time I don’t think I need to go overestimating my own importance any either. It’ll go however it goes, I’m just flattered they asked.
And let me state right here and now, for the record: as an experienced P-shop hand for lo, these many years, the Gimp SUCKS. Been working the Bettie image, or trying to, and getting precisely NOWHERE with it. It’s so bad I’m seriously considering going back to the near-dead, worn-out old iMac for all my image-editing needs, no foolin’. Even went so far as to download and install something called GimpShop, which is supposed to rejigger the Gimp user interface, scripts, commands terminology, and other things to make them more comfortable for longtime P-shop devotees to deal with.
The install process required updating Java, then executing several commands in Terminal to make the plugin executable, then altering a few lines in the plugin code itself in a text editor, among other things. All of which I duly did. Now, I’m by no means a Terminal maven, and would never claim I was. But I’ve used it enough to not be afraid I’m gonna accidentally blow up the machine, catch the house on fire, launch the nukes, or any other such-like either.
And after three solid hours (!) of that crap, guess what? It no workee. Screw it, I’ma go post something.
Just browsing I can see where there would be a market. What exactly that target is probably determines how well you can do.
Well, computers suck. I mean they really suck. Unfortunately they are the least expensive way to do most jobs. Trying to keep up with software changes is trying enough, and then you get operating system makeovers that do nothing new, nothing better, but accessing anything and everything is different. I have them installed and running machinery all over the world. One day I can connect to each one, the next day you find that half of them will no longer connect because of an update done by the communications software supplier. Nothing on my end has changed, nothing on the machine changed, just the middle man changed, requiring updates on every machine. It’s exasperating.
So, I feel your pain to some degree. Wish I could help, but that end isn’t my specialty.
I wish you the best with your substack venture; just hope you’re not counting your chickens…
Well, hell. I just realized I’ve been reading several “substack” items every week. Usually from a link, an example:
https://dossier.substack.com/p/exclusive-the-dossier-uncovers-wef
Just noticed it in the address.
“Accidental Release” my ass.
The Plandemic.
And while that “accident” was in progress, Wuhan citizens were not allowed to travel out of Wuhan, unless it was on a plane headed out of the country to place like Italy.
What a terrible accident.
Milan has over 100k (or as many as 200k?) Chinese Migrant workers in their clothing and shoe factories and they all went home for CNY and then returned.
Northern Italy has a lot more than that. Many of the old textile factories are now chinese owned and staffed with chinese workers. I forget the number but it was hundreds of thousands with most illegal. I think the textile capital, Prato, has 60K alone. The Italian authorities don’t truly crack down because the owners of the factories will make trouble. That’s just from memory but I believe it is accurate.
Here is an early article with some discussion:
https://spectator.org/coronavirus-the-price-of-luxury/
Yes, I should have noted the connection in my comment. They traveled after CNY from Wuhan to places west, especially Italy.
We saw this real time Barry, but it’s good to remind people about the truth since they may never have saw articles like yours.
I remember hearing over 200k but I don’t want to exaggerate and so I went with a conservative number. Doesn’t really matter though. 100k would have been sufficient to ensure an outbreak and Italy (free health care!!) has one of the worst health care systems anyway. Recipe for Disaster. .
They KNEW Trump would restrict travel from China. Anyway, they needed a Global Outbreak to properly spread the Spanish Flu comparisons.