Category: Personal

How to make actual money without leaving the house

There are loads of articles floating around the internet about how to earn money online, make money from home, etc. And most of them are, as you would expect, written for consideration, advertising scams, and maybe at best only have a couple of good suggestions while the rest are a complete waste of time. So I’d totally understand if you saw the headline of this post and thought, “Well, crap, she’s gone commercial. First ads, now this.” Though honestly, the ads are just one of the few ways that I’ve found to make use of my skills and resources to...

How a one-off rant about hair donation changed how I blog

Five years ago, I wrote what has become, by far, the most popular and most widely-read article I’ve ever written, with close to 200k unique views. My article on hair donation and why it’s not for me turns up on the first page of results for a number of Google searches related to hair donation, gets shared on social media by people I don’t even know, and stirred up the most comment section controversy this blog has ever seen. When I wrote this article, the only people who really read this blog were friends, family, and a few colleagues. I’d...

Freebooting needs to die: 7 online marketing trends that are ruining the internet

If you’ve spent any time on Facebook in the last couple of years, odds are you’ve come across and fallen victim to a lot of marketing and revenue-generating tactics that pollute your feed, steal from creators, and just generally frustrate you and waste your time. They’re the social equivalent of spam, and they’re ruining the internet. 1. Freebooting This term might be new to you, but the practice almost certainly isn’t. Freebooting is the practice of taking media, usually video, that you don’t own, then rehosting it or embedding it on your own page surrounded by ads that make you...

Courtesy: Ubisoft

The one thing I wish game companies would stop doing at E3

It’s that time of year again–that time when the whole of my productivity grinds to a halt as I sit glued to my computer for days watching the livestreams of all of the major game companies’ E3 press conferences. Every year, my friends and I, as well as the internet as a whole, pick the winners and losers of the conference, get into a fangirl/fanboy froth over announcements about our favorite franchises, and stand either amazed or underwhelmed (or maybe a little of both) at announcements of new IP, new features, and resurrected titles. But there’s one thing I wish...

Experiments in hacking my sleep patterns: Why I may never be a morning person

I’ve read in so many places over the years that the most successful people in history were almost invariably early risers. Over the weekend, someone challenged me to 7 days of waking up “stupidly early,” as a way to test if it would improve my productivity. I asked them to define, “stupidly early,” and they replied, “two or three hours before you usually get up.” For me, that’s still a lie-in for most people–being self-employed as a freelance writer, I typically rise around noon (sometimes later if I was up very late engrossed in a book or a side project...