When Life Hands you Lemons

I’d like to address something that people might not know about: something called clickbaiting.

Clickbaiting

1. Lists. I’ve noticed a lot of people like to read lists because they’re (supposedly) concise and to the point. Cracked is a great place for well-written and explained lists, but sites like Buzzfeed have rammed this format into the ground. Buzzfeed perfected it. Their lists require barely any attention and very little brainpower to absorb.

2. Girls. Another way you can clickbait is by including a picture of a scantily-clad or good-looking female in a thumbnail next to your link. Youtube videos are especially guilty of this, especially since the format of Youtube makes it extremely easy to do so. Pretty self-explanatory.

3. Cliffhanger. I’m sure you’ve seen this before–it’s not a new method and it certainly isn’t exclusive to the internet. It’s the “omg u won’t bliev what hapend next!!!!!!!” Usually you can. This is used mostly by news sites, who will post part of a news story and end the post with “follow the rest of the story at our website” and include a condensed link (such as bit.ly). What you may not know that some link condensers, like bit.ly, keep track of how many times the link has been clicked and will give the owner site metrics.

4. Targeting groups. A few years ago, Kotaku was especially guilty of this. They had purposely written up some controversial articles to get people to come, read and comment on their posts. They called it “nerdbaiting.” And it worked.

5. Pretending to be a news site. Kotaku. Gawker. Gizmodo. Engadget. Even Buzzfeed. None of these are news sites and everything you read on them should be taken with a grain of salt. 

6. Controversy. I believe that Westboro Baptist Church has been in the right since their creation and that everybody who believes otherwise is going to hell.

Obviously, I don’t have a full list of ten things.

I came up with the idea of writing this about a week ago, and I’m glad I waited to write it. I just sat in on a meeting at work where they literally just told us how to do these things. Personally, I find clickbaiting detestable, especially if the content within is neither particularly interesting nor useful. It’s just a ploy to get another fraction of a penny from ad revenue. I equate it to posts that say, “lik if u cry evrytim!” However, now that I’ve pretty much been asked to partake in it, I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what to think about myself, the company, or the state of the internet and how it’s become a highly-commercialized fishing farm.

But there’s ways you can increase traffic without luring people:

Not clickbaiting

7. Gaining actual traction. People don’t do this because it’s the hardest one. It’s hard to get popular by continually pumping out high-quality content because it’s hard to continually pump out high-quality content. Eventually, if you make enough good work, people will keep checking back to your site to see if you’ve made updates.

8. Sharing. This may seem like a type of clickbaiting but it really isn’t. All of you see how I share that I have a new blog post: a simple link without explanation. So many of you have seen my blog by now that if you see the link, you know you’re in for a wild ride if you click it. Besides, without my simple act of posting the link, only 1% of you would know about my blog in the first place.

9. Branding. Branding requires getting exposed in other forms of media, like on Youtube or Twitter. I’ve secured my “Chinese Einstein” wordpress site, and it’d be incredibly easy for someone to search it up on Youtube and Twitter–that is, if I had decided to go with those. 

10. Offering rewards. This one’s hard because it requires money. It’s things like having sweepstakes and raffles for things like redeemable codes or discount coupons. I’ve seen many Youtubers gain traction from this sort of thing.

Easy enough, right? 

A thought came to me when I was at a picnic at church. Since it was a pretty nice day out and we were gathering quite a large number of people together, naturally, a bunch of people brought their dogs.

They say a dog is a man’s best friend. It’s something I’ve heard since I was really little. But then you stop and you try to observe things from a dog’s perspective.

A dog, then, really starts to become something else. Usually there will only be one dog in a household living with a bunch of humans. It’s not hard to imagine what it must be like for the dog then–they get treated like the happy, powerless child of the family. They try to get what they want, or if they can’t, they’ll cry and whimper and make everyone feel bad. General dog stuff.

What happens if you get a bunch of dogs together, all of who are owned by different humans? You suddenly get a bunch of dogs meeting each other for the first time, some of them not even knowing that other dogs exist.

At the picnic, there was a family who brought their two dogs and the dogs’ puppy. It was almost as if the two dogs went carnal. They took extreme care of their puppy and even went so far as to attack some other dogs that got within a few feet of the pup.

Of course, the owners of this dog family were pissed. You don’t want to be those guys who bring the giant dogs that destroyed all the other dogs. It’s supposed to be a friendly picnic. But really, what choice do you leave them?

The dogs spend all day shut up in a house or in a yard without any knowledge of what goes on outside. As far as they know, the world is made for humans and no other dog can be trusted. I don’t blame them.

I wonder if dogs in other countries have the same problem. There are many many countries where dogs roam free on the streets. Do they have problems with trusting other dogs, or are they all homies? My gut tells me the latter is probably true. In the wild, the young aren’t immediately ripped away from their families to be sold to “masters.” They get to live free in the dangers of the world.

Imagine a world where humans are on the level of dogs and were domineered by a superior race of animals, set apart from all other humans, yet were still perfectly capable of doing everything humans did. I’m not sure about you, but I don’t think I would feel very much like I was best friends with the one who owned me.

Happy fourth. Hope your pets are safe.

But not in the typical way. (surprise! I have an internship.)

I noticed recently that I haven’t been listening to music as much as I used to.

It’s strange, really. I constantly hear music playing in my head but I never find it comfortable enough to just pull out my own music, stick my headphones in and listen. I also never really noticed it until…well, tonight. I spend a lot of time on the bus, in school, or at work, and I don’t listen to music until I’m in a place where I can feel like I can sing along or dance without bothering other people. Which isn’t very many places. It’s just my car.

Now that I’m not working at the preschool anymore, I don’t have to spend that much in my car every day–on average, I spend a maximum of thirty minutes of day in my car, driving between the park & ride and my home. I even drive to a far-away park & ride.

There’s not much music you can listen to in 30 minutes. If I’m only driving for 15 minutes, I don’t even consider it worth it to plug my Zune into my stereo to listen to it. So now I find myself craving music.

Literally craving it.

There’s no cure for it, either. I either need to spend more time in my car, at home, or need to get comfortable with listening to music in public places. None of these are going to happen. Guess I’ll just have to suffer for the time bein’.

Just tryin’a get back into the groove.

I’m going to bed, Bryan.

By the way, if you haven’t already, check out my “quote of the day” tab at the top. Maybe you’ve made the list. 🙂

Every time I look back to memories, I find that I always get the feeling of wishing that things would go back to the way they were. And then there’s always a hope. You might already know this, but things never go back to the way they were.

Time is linear but it’s measured circularly. We’re always going to have another April 27th, but we’ll never have another April 27th, 2014. You’re never going to go back in time. You can relive memories in your head but you’ll never experience them again (sans futuristic  technology). Things will be one way for a while, but when it’s over, it’ll just be over.

Your yearly trip is going to have different people who have done different things during the year. You will talk about different things, visit different places and do other things. But that will come to an end some time.

And when it’s gone, it’s gone.

You’ll be so swamped with new business and the new experiences will be warm and exciting to you. But you won’t ever realize how much you miss until you hit the void. You try to fill the void with something similar, or even something that’s as close as possible. But it just won’t be the same. Your instrument won’t feel or sound as good as it used to. You’ll never again get to play in the same football team that took state championships. You’ll never get to laugh and cry with your best friend.

But even though it’s gone and it seriously sucks, there’s one thing you can always remember: things will be okay.

No, things won’t go back to the way they once were. But things are going to be okay. You’ll be leaping through rings of fire, rebuilding your character brick by brick, and biting your lip trying your best not to cry. When you look forward, you realize that each experience you’ve had, each person you’ve met, each tear you’ve shed… makes you who you are today. No matter how much crap you go through, you’re going to come out on top a better, stronger person.

Growing up is the most bittersweet thing of all. But growing up is a part of growing up. You can’t dwell too much on the past or it’ll eat you up. Keep your head up and know that things–good or bad–will come and go.

But no matter what happens, no matter who tries to hold you down, no matter what you lose:

Things are going to be okay.

Potpurr一

Why do we bare our teeth when we smile? Other animals bare their teeth when they want to show dominance or threaten others. It’s almost like humans are saying, “you have amused me. I will now proceed to bite you.”

Potpurr이

Distinguishing fantasy from reality has been easy for kids in the past. There have been countless studies on the effects of violent video games on children and none of them have turned up positive (yet, for some reason, we keep pouring money into researching this). However, with the development of the Oculus Rift and virtual reality becoming closer and closer to reality, will children still have the capabilty to tell what’s real from what’s not?

My gut tells me yes. As real as VR becomes, there will always be some kind of hint that will remind you that you’re in a simulation and not in real life. It’s easier for younger people than older people to pick up these hints. Maybe the problem will be that old people will have problems dealing with the effects of violent virtual reality simulations. Who knows.

Potpurr-три

Every once in a while I get worried about the state of the world that we’re leaving for our kids. Then I remember that the previous generation worried about the exact same thing. Sure, the world may have gotten worse but that’s only an opinion. And we’re alive, aren’t we? The world still exists and we haven’t killed ourselves. Yet