Anonymous asked:
Why don't you post anymore?
sexpigeon answered:
- I got older. And as I got older the already-questionable premise of this blog started to feel just-plain-creepy.
- I got sleepier. When you get older, you get sleepier.
- I had a family. My child was born in April of 2016. You can see the immediate and precipitous decline in posting volume thereafter.
- My child was sick. He was born with cystic fibrosis. This has been devastating. And time-consuming. His breathing treatments take hours daily, which contributes to the sleepiness discussed in item 2.
- I threw myself into my work. For the first couple of years of working at Tumblr, it was far and away the best job I’ve ever had. And likely ever will have. The office was thick with weirdos and we were given a shocking amount of freedom to do whatever we wanted—as long as it was relatively inconsequential. Visionaries did not do well at Tumblr. Jokesters and aesthetes did perfectly. I spent all my time filling our official channels with stupid, confusing garbage that I was horribly proud of, and remain proud of to this day.
- Work got bad. They hired some visionaries. I spent two whole years writing and rewriting unused company vision statements at the behest of these visionaries. The uselessness of this task was overwhelming. I should have picked myself up and posted modest entertainments on this modestly entertaining blog, but instead I simply wallowed and fretted and atrophied.
- As did everyone else who clung on. We almost reveled in the poison of it all. We drank too much and filled the Tumblr app and Tumblr staff blog with nihilistic discontents. There was pleasure in that.
- I grew doubtful of my talents. Maybe these visionaries were charlatans, but maybe these charlatans were right. Maybe I needed to come around to their way of thinking. Maybe everything I do is bad, lame, indefensible. Maybe this blog is exhibit A.
- I got shy. I would compose texts and not send them, fearful of how boring they were.
- I got depressed. That soft, round depression that inspires nothing. A prickly depression can be a decent creative driver. But this was just a blob.
- Drawing Garfield was a way to deal with this depression. This should be plain to anyone who has seen those posts. People started sending me links to kooky Garfield stuff, which I appreciated, but which had the unintentional sourness of a children’s birthday present. You like Garfields so I got you a Garfield! Soon your room is full of Garfields because that’s what you’re about. You stop caring about Garfield but you keep up the charade so no one’s feelings get hurt.
- I am approaching mid-life, now, or perhaps I am firmly in it. And the outlines of a crisis are forming and they’re exactly as boring as you think. I’m not creatively fulfilled. Boo hoo!
- We tried to leave America, do you know that? I had a very nice job lined up in Montreal. Less pay, but Montreal is cheap. Montreal is also generous with benefits if you are a citizen or a permanent resident. But it turns out you cannot become a citizen or a permanent resident if you have an expensive pre-existing health condition. Cystic fibrosis such a condition, so Canada did not want us. Another blow, one too hurtful to talk about on this dumb little blog.
- I could not talk about any of this stuff on this dumb little blog, but it’s all I’ve been able to think about for the last two years.
- This dumb little blog! It made my life what it is. It had about 40 followers when it was discovered by a neighborhood blogger, who passed it along to a city blogger, who made it a minor local sensation (a sensation! how embarrassing to write that!), which led to a local designer discovering that I, too, was designer, which led to our small design business, which led to the acquisition of our small design business, which led to our move to New York, which led to my working for Tumblr, which led to being able to make whatever I wanted and force millions of teenagers to look at it. God, what fun. And now it’s done.
Kinda same
To commemorate the violence against LGBTQ members, Pride Shield created a bulletproof rainbow flag. The thematic installation is made up 193 pride flags, one for every country in the world. When positioned together, they defy bullets, which aims to encourage the importance of togetherness. (Source)
More posts here: sixpenceee.com/tagged/posts
This. A thousand times this.
I literally started crying watching this
brain: u gotta be… The Best™
me: ok so we’ll work hard then?
brain: no work… only Best.
How I targeted the Reddit CEO with Facebook ads to get an interview at Reddit
A bit over 2 years ago I was coming off a failed startup and out looking for new opportunities. I am not a fan of looking for jobs, my style is to target interesting companies and convince them to let me join them in their quest. So I decided to target Reddit because it looked like they were making some new moves. And, because, it’s Reddit!
I hatched the hare-brained scheme to write a blog article that might catch the attention of a particular person, get them to read it somehow, and then say “hey kid, I like the cut of your jib, do you want to come help us conquer the world?”. Sure, that person is actually younger than me, but you get the point.
I wanted to work at Reddit. Well, not just work at Reddit, but develop something very cool at Reddit that I think can make a huge impact on the business. So I wrote about it. I knew that the CEO of Reddit was a technical founder, so I put quite a deal of effort into that blog entry to try to impress him. Now, how to get him to see it?
My first thought was email. I can just email him! But that’s boring. What about getting my article to the top of Hacker News? I bet the CEO (and founder) of Reddit still frequents Hacker News. It is an amazing community, built off an early version of Reddit, and run by Y-Combinator (which incubated Reddit way back when). The problem is, I didn’t think my article would be interesting enough to a large crowd to make it to the top of HN.
Then I remembered a trick a friend of mine taught me a while back. That friend (who shall remain nameless, unless he wants me to name him) was running a startup and was using a very interesting technique to increase his chances of closing deals. Who wants to buy from a company they have never heard of? Not many people. His strategy was to target prospects (as directly as possible) with Facebook ads about his product so that when he called or met with them, they would already know the name. They probably didn’t know why they knew, but they had seen the name before, and that meant a great deal when meeting or speaking for the first time.
So I decided I would target the CEO of Reddit with Facebook ads.
But how? I didn’t have a big budget so I needed to be clever.
It turns out the Reddit CEO had a public Facebook profile, so I could go there to see details about him. Where he lived. What he was interested in. I took that info to the Facebook platform to help narrow down the campaign. But I didn’t want everyone to click on it, just one person. So I custom tailored the ad to directly target the one person I wanted to read it.
“Steve: Reddit needs recommendations”
The ad reached 197 people. 4 People clicked on it. One of them was the CEO of Reddit. I spent a total of $10.62.
Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, saw my ad, clicked on it, read (probably skimmed) my article, and liked it well enough to send a note to Reddit HR to contact me about a position.
Mission accomplished.
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Chris Seline
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P.S. I am out again looking for new opportunities. Drop me a line at my first name at twicsy.com if you like the cut of my jib!
Prof says he’ll grade students on a curve, so they organize a boycott of the exams and all get As
Johns Hopkins Computer Science prof Professor Peter Fröhlich grades his students on a curve: the highest score on the final gets an A and everyone else is graded accordingly.
Clever students in Fröhlich’s “Intermediate Programming”, “Computer System Fundamentals,” and “Introduction to Programming for Scientists and Engineers” figured out that this meant that if they all boycotted the exam, they’d all get As.
So they organized a boycott, milling around the hall outside the class where the exams were being sat, sternly reminding each other that if no one sat the exam they’d all get straight As, ignoring Fröhlich’s pleas to come and sit the exam.
Fröhlich praised his students’ solidarity: “The students learned that by coming together, they can achieve something that individually they could never have done. At a school that is known (perhaps unjustly) for competitiveness I didn’t expect that reaching such an agreement was possible.”
https://boingboing.net/2018/04/24/hang-together-or-hang-separate-2.html
Who will ride or die with me this hard
theweirdwideweb