And yet, it’s only 9 seconds long:

I’m going to take a stab at putting something on here every day. Honestly, I probably won’t follow through on this because I’ll find myself straining to have an opinion on extremely trivial and mundane bullshit.

Kind of like Classmates.com.

After oh, let’s say 5 years of being pestered by these bastards I finally decided to sign up for the minimal subscription to view the people who’d signed my profile or some such. Whee. I could have spent that $15 on all kinds of things that would have provided more gratification; like a dozen boxes of thumbtacks to roll around naked on. Yeah, I ended a sentence with a preposition, what.

TL;DR version: 4 of the 8 people who’d “signed” my profile page had absolutely no connection to me whatsoever. These people I assume are plants by Classmates.com that trigger the “Hey hey hey! You’ve got people who want to talk to YOU YOU YOU” type emails that have been spamming my inbox over the years. That might sound all “tinfoil-hat conspiracy-ish” to you, but having worked for two different Social Networking companies I have enough first-hand knowledge to know better.

As far as the other 4 go, 3 of which were people I had barely known and one was an Army buddy I still keep in touch with every so often. So Classmates.com was batting .150 for people I gave a shit about.

I did have an email from a girl (well, woman now I guess) who I vaguely remember running against for 8th grade student council president. We both lost, to the cute girl who promised in her campaign speech to get rid of detention hall and secure the lunchroom borders. Or something. What’s funny is that we actually had a back-room conference with the principal after her victory to confer about her unethical promises and pandering*. I really had no objections since I ran on a platform of “I get to stand up in front of the school and be a jackass for 5 minutes for my own personal amusement”.

Anyway…

So yeah, I certainly didn’t get my $15 worth out of Classmates.com. And to top it off, I was spammed with more goddamn offers for crap I didn’t need as a part of the sign-up process. What the hell? I was already giving you guys my fucking money, and you felt the need to try and squeeze more out of me?

Were I Gene Siskel I’d give Classmates.com one big, desiccated middle finger up for being a waste of bandwidth and the single biggest disappointment as far as Social Networking sites go. Hell, it’s the granddaddy of them all and had the potential to be what Facebook is today. Instead, it’s a festering pit of pop-ups, spam, and things we should leave behind.

*She’s probably working for Karl Rove now although I can’t be bothered to log back in to that site and find out.

Really, not joking.

So having just posted the Tesla Coil version of the Super Mario Bros. themesong (below) I went back to do some work on the advertising on my other sites. I’ve been looking into Chitika’s new “Premium Ads” which only show to US search engine traffic and decided to give them a go since the sites are well SEO’d.

Now I’m one of those guys who’s compelled to push every button on a thing just to see what it does. So when I was presented with this screen on the publisher control panel, I clicked both options just to see what would happen even though I was going to make an ad:

And this is, no lie, what it linked to:

Apparently Chitika has a /b/tard on staff somewhere. I might just have to run more of their ads on principle.

Also, I was going to embed that video but it turns out that every single Rick Astley “Never Gonna Give You Up” or “Rickroll” video on YouTube has embedding disabled for some reason. OMG Conspiracy.

Except this one:

And it’s so awesome:

I wanted to repost this here because I just came across it going through old Bullshido content and it’s fairly personal (thus relevant to my exercise in Internet Narcissism otherwise known as “blogging”.) It’s just a snippet and you can read the rest at the link below:

I haven’t always been a Skeptic, nor have I always been pro-science. Being a bored, introspective youth of 15 with above-average intelligence and stuck in a small hick town, I myself started studying the paranormal/supernatural. My mom worked two jobs, and I pretty much raised myself, so I didn’t have anyone to call bullshit on my newly forming beliefs. And the fact that I seemed to be smarter than everyone I was around only fed my teenage ego to the point where I started assuming I knew better than everyone else, including Science.

For five solid years and tapering off slowly after that, I absorbed everything I could get my hands on. I had a collection of books which included original texts dating back to the 19th century and spanning topics from just about any paranormal/supernatural/occult philosophy you could imagine. For example, I had an original edition of “The Secret Science Behind Miracles” which detailed how following the religious practices of the Hawaiian Kahunas could (and let me see if I remember this correctly) allow you to connect with a universal superconscious and use it to perform miracles. I had copies of medieval manuscripts on ritual magic, and more contemporary books by Aliester Crowley and Israel Regardie. I read Yeats just because he was a member of the Golden Dawn, and I can still recite the words of the “Wiccan Rede” from memory. Hell, I’m a walking encyclopedia of obscure occult bullshit.

But as I got older (and started to get laid more often too), it became more and more obvious that there was a reason all of this stuff and the people who believed in it existed on the fringes of society: they were fucking fruitcake nujobs, every last one of them. Seriously, go to a spiritual/metaphysics/type convention sometime. You will see the bottom rungs of the social ladder coming together like an oversized support group. It’s not hard to draw the conclusion that many people are attracted to the occult because it gives them the illusion that they are somehow special and different (better) than the rest of society that they have difficulty interacting with. Many of these people aren’t “misunderstood”, their problem is that they’re very well understood as kooks, freaks, and geeks who are socially inept.

Rest of the Post

Is there an instrument greater than the electric guitar? I don’t think so, and if you disagree you deserve to have your face melted off by the sheer power of rock… or something equally virile and horrible at the same time.

This is so not me, but nonetheless it’s awesome:

Attention restaurant owners/website administrators:

Every time you put your menu in PDF form, you’re kicking your visitor’s browser in the crotch. For the love of Ramsay, please put your menu into the actual site content. There are plenty of content management systems that will allow even the illegal kitchen workers to update it if need be.

If freaking Chili’s can get it right, so can you. I’m talking to you in particular, Piropo’s.

I haven’t played a lot of First Person Shooters over the years, but upon the recommendation of a man many at Bullshido know as “Boyd”, I picked up the Orange Box and got sucked into Team Fortress 2.

Let’s just say there was a bit of a learning curve and I got smoked relentlessly until I figured things out. And after having gotten 35 kills in one round I now feel qualified to post a few secrets. But because I dutifully hate GameFAQs like every other self-respecting gamer, I’m not writing this in the style of one of their player guides or with any intent that it should be compared to them.

How to ruin people’s day using Advanced Engineering.

I’m going to focus on the two most popular maps, 2Fort and Dustbowl, because seriously – the other ones kind of suck.

2Fort

2Fort’s map is a “Capture the Flag” type game where you have to sneak/force/cheat your way into the enemy’s intelligence room in the basement of their fort, and return with a briefcase of “intelligence”. If you’re reading this, that’s probably about as detailed an explanation as I should write because you already know this being that you’ve played the game. If you haven’t, then why would you read this? Seriously, go do some pushups or something.

In order to keep myself from writing a freaking novel about a damn video game I’ll bullet point this sucker.

Out of the gates: When starting a new game the first thing you need to do after running out of your spawn point is get a sentry up inside the doorway to the right of your spawn but slightly inside the room and back about a “foot” or two. This should be worth a kill or two from eager Scouts trying to earlybird into your Intel room and it covers both the back stairs and through your battlements using double jump. Upgrade it as fast as possible by running back into your Resupply room. Immediately afterwards, drop a teleport entrance in the piles of hay; you’ll need this later. You can elect to set up shop here, as it’s a good spot for protecting your base and helping out your team. Or, you could just not give a crap about your teammates and move on to rack up your own kill count.

Offensive Engineer Tactics: Depending on how vigilant, nooberific, or aggressive the other team is, you can often build your sentry guns inside the enemy base. Hell, I’ve even managed to get a whole “nest” (more about that later) built in their Intel room to pour extra salt in the enemy wounds. You do this by leapfrogging your sentry gun progressively further into their base.

Start out by building a sentry gun right up against the front wall of their base, far enough back from the door that you can’t shoot at it, but far enough up that you can stand behind it. You’ll have to have a bit of luck to get it fully built before it’s noticed, but if you can manage this you’ll have a great little kill-counter-racker-upper (totally not a word).

From here, build a teleport exit in the room straight across from their main spawn/Resupply room. It’s the one with the hole in the floor. Your entrance should already be built, so just run back to your base (luck again) and get a full load of metal. Teleport back over and set up a dispenser along the wall of that room on the side they can’t shoot at. Make sure you leave enough space to stand in front of it without poking out into the doorway. Now, build your sentry gun and upgrade it as fast as you can. Now, you’re a one-man spawn-camping machine and your team has the run of their base short of the Intel room. I got 35 kills doing this. Just kneel down and whack your sentry when they try to destroy it; your dispenser (behind you) will keep you alive and stocked with metal. When done right, it looks something like this:

I’ve already spent more time writing this than I intended so I’ll put something up about Dustbowl later.