My Life on the Net

I spent the better part of my day watching Hellboy II today.  The original Hellboy was something I really enjoyed. This one… not so much.

“The mythical world starts a rebellion against humanity in order to rule the Earth, so as Hellboy and his team returns they must save the world from the rebellious creatures. Now, as the creatures who inhabit the spiritual realm gear-up for an all out attack on the human plane, the only one capable of saving the Earth is a tough-talking hellspawn rejected by both worlds.”

Written by Anthony Pereyra {hypersonic91@yahoo.com}

I guess if one thing worked in this movie it would be the trailer - which managed to make me excited about getting to see this movie.  The title may have worked too - if it had anything to do with the movie whatsoever.  If you didn’t know that the ‘Golden Army’ would make an appearance, then you didn’t read the title.  If you read the title, you’d wonder where the ‘Golden Army’ didn’t take such a freakin’ precidence in the movie.

Not only that, but the characters didn’t seem to have the depth they did last time.  Hellboy seems to have become shallow, the head Agent a little needy and dare I need talk about any of the other characters… Have you ever heard of a wooden cast?  Yep.

I really, really, wanted it to be good.  But after hearing Zen Elements’ reaction I made sure I didn’t hype myself on this movie.  It still didn’t help.

4/10.

I’ve been meaning to do a review/rant of twitter for a long time. Well, ever since I began using it over a year ago. Since then, I’ve posted over four thousand tweets and gained quite a few followers from what I’ve said or done over there.

But while most of us have been in the mix of twittering, following and being followed in turn - how have we not acted as a community to fix some of the worst problems faced by twitter? There are so many little things, but the one integral part that isn’t being sorted is simple to remedy.

Some people just don’t understand it and in turn, abuse it.

If you’re a twitterer who followed a link to this blog post then you know that I, as well as others, use it to promote their content. No problems there as our main use of it is to share ourselves and in turn learn about other people. But some didn’t get the memo and see this as more of a content delivery system and never have a two-way conversation between twitterers.

These people follow thousands of people a day and only publish about their own work. Almost every twitter update is a link to something of their own creation and somehow they expect us to be nice, follow them back and even go so far as to sharing their content for them. No way.

Why haven’t our twitter techs sorted this? It’s a sad thing that if you’re a sheep, will you stop yourself from falling off a cliff or get pushed by the crowds? Without people writing and complaining, these spam-tweets will continue to grow. We need a revolt. We have spent that past few months ignoring these spammers and only thinking of it as a minor inconvenience.

This needs to stop.

Will you be a sheep or will you simply ask the twitter techs to put a limit on how many people you can follow a day? These people are following thousands a day so limiting the follow count to 20 or 50 per day would be simple enough not to cause problems to almost every twitterer. It seems like a simple fix, so why aren’t we asking demanding?

We’re the community. We should set the ground rules.

While busy times do break your blogging schedules, nothing hurts more than to find a writer’s block impeding your ability to blog proficiently and consistently.  As you might have guessed it, yep, it’s happened to me too.

This has been the first time since this iteration of My Life on the Net that i’ve slammed head first into the wall, but that doesn’t matter - because that’s not what were talking about today. Just like anyone else, I’m pretty sure you don’t want to know about the boring work I’m doing at the moment. Yep, I guessed so.

This is exactly the point made by Margaret Mason in “No One Cares What You Had for Lunch” - a self-help book aimed for bloggers like me just when they can’t think of what to write about and offers 100 ideas to fill up their blog.

But why buy a book when you can just search for blog ideas online?  While the methods on the web help in the short run and force you get out a mediocre post, Mason divulges how to change your blogging habits to keep your blog interesting to read week after week.  She shares tips to generate interest, and once this interest is capped like the oil wells in Saudi Arabia - suck as much readership as possible.

I find myself using it almost every week, and is useful due each of her categories are time specific - so even if you have only a couple of minutes, you’ll still be able to cram something interesting out - but if you have hours to spend thinking and researching a blog topic, there’s still something there to write about.

However, there are some drawbacks to the book.  For what you’re paying (I paid £15 [$30]) for the privilege of this book - you’re not getting as much as you might had hoped - 100 ideas only last so long and seem definitely shorter when some post ideas either don’t suit your style or when some seem to be too similar to each other to use.  If you can, try looking at other amazon sellers or shopping about - after I bought my copy I managed to find one for only £5 which seemed very reasonable.  Also, this book is catering for a very specific niche - bloggers that wish to show off their lives but not make it repetitive - so if you’re more of a non-personal blogger I’d skip this book.

Despite the drawbacks, I highly recommend this book to anyone who has been blogging for a while and needs a few more ideas or even a blogger just starting out.  Mason’s ideas coupled with her humor and descriptions of each of her ideas really helps to get the creative blogging juices flowing again and will forever help me blog in the future.

See more from Maggie Mason at http://www.mightygirl.com/