Category: Advertisements

Apparently, someone of Facebook thinks I am a baseball fan, or that I am so desperate to learn to code that I would like to learn Pandas through either fantasy football or baseball.

C’mon, man, I tell the story of the only software product I was paid to write (over and over, like an old man with five or ten go-to stories to tell over and over), when I was in high school, I wrote a baseball stat manager in BASIC 2.0 for the Commodore 64:

My high school’s baseball team manager paid me $50 for something that could save and calculate the team’s stats.

Funny, in my various dilettante careers, I was most highly paid for poetry.

• Poetry: $100 for “Canny” in There Will Be War Volume X. I think I was supposed to get a share of royalties, too, but I no longer can reach out to my editor to wrench it from the publishing house as he did my flat payment.
• Software development: $50 for Baseball Stats Manager v1.0.
• Short fiction: $5 for “Reading Faces” in Show and Tell magazine.

You know, I guess I have been paid money for nonfiction, including pieces in Writers Journal and History magazines as well as perhaps some cash from Artisan Journal back in the day.

Blogging and self-publishing, though? Money sinks.

Facebook proffers this item for my review:

I really hope that it’s because I’ve posted that an Iron Maiden poster got me a wife.

And not because aforementioned beautiful wife has put an Iron Maiden cassette into the deck in our 2008 vehicle which I’ve been listening to in the mornings taking my oldest to band practice.

Because I’m really close to believing that my phone was also listening and selling that information to shadowy Internet data brokers who passed it onto Facebook.

I did click through, but I am not sure that she would get enough use out of a $50 cooler to buy it for her for Christmas.

I wrote and scheduled this post last night; this morning, in my Facebook memories, I see this post:

Unfortunately, I often run out of Iron Maiden before I run out of work day.

Clearly they saw me coming in 2017.

So I read this article in Chrome with the JavaScript off: ‘Preppers’ Quietly Stock Up for the ‘Perfect Storm’, and it mentions a prepper supply company:

Keith Bansemer, president of My Patriot Supply in Salt Lake City, said his business has grown exponentially amid widespread fears of a return to COVID-19 lockdowns, empty store shelves, and forced vaccinations that will limit personal freedoms.

And I log into Facebook minutes later in a separate browser, and I get:

You know, that’s pretty fast information sharing. Too fast.

An ad for some frippery I saw on Facebook:

I thought, How cool is that! A reversible trenchcoat that turns into a cape!

Oh, but no. It’s just some overpriced “artist” putting your face on some stock portrait background. Which is not something I’m interested in.

A trench coat that you can turn inside out and it’s a cape, now that might be tempting.

Yeah, this kind of shelf would not last long at Nogglestead:

What is that, attached to a couple of 1x2s with four screws? If I wanted to keep my books stacked on the floor, I would put them there in the first place, not buy something off of the Internet, assemble it, and wait for gravity to work quickly.

Dubious offer seen on Facebook:

I’m afraid that might describe me. I mean, male, software tester, and, they tell me, older.

Although I have to say that I suspect what kinds of products the Internet might target to older males, and no necesito huevos de tortuga!

I have mentioned and alluded to the fact that I am not on Facebook much these days. I go some days without checking in, but I do like to go and see what I’ve posted on this date in the past, and some organizations with whom I deal use it as the primary communications channel. But I’m not posting a lot of content over there to fill the data mines.

And, seemingly, I have muted most everyone, or no one I know is posting much, either. Because my feed tends to fill with various non-sequiturs and seemingly random advertisements and recommendations. I think the ratio of random sponsored stuff and actual friends’ posts is closing in on 1:1, and as I mentioned, some of the things don’t really make much sense to me.

That’s not to say I’m going to poke fun at the advertisements and recommendations. I mean, they might be effective to appropriate target audiences, but to me?

Continue reading “The Whiff of Desperation” →

You know, I think I would subject myself to a CPAP before I would order something that was cut from A Clockwork Orange for being too over the top.

Wait a minute. I get the sense that he did not write all of those books.

I don’t know why I am seeing this ad:

99.9% caffeine free is only .1% good at all.

I was so put off I didn’t even click to see the woman do her presumed happy cacao-loving dance.

Fun fact about Nogglestead: We have, and have had for twenty years free weights at our home in Casinoport, Old Trees, and Nogglestead. We’ve added an elliptical here at Nogglestead. And the items go mostly unused; I’ve given this some thought as I look around the lower level and think about how we could rearrange it for some novelty.

Personally, I need the ritual of going to the gym to exercise. If I’m home, I have other things to do. Often work or checking blogs. Or tapping out twee little posts like this one.

Yesterday, I posted a bit on the audio course The Search for Intelligent Life in Space.

Today, I get a Facebook ad for launching my DNA to the moon.

Creepy fast.

The only thing that could make it creepier is if they were telling me that they were going to send my DNA to a Lagrange Point whether I liked it or not.

To be honest, I am not sure what sort of information the advertisers have on me. They think I’m wealthy, old, and beset by a variety of health issues. Somehow, brothers and sisters, my DNA is probably not the best hope for resurrecting the human race at some point. I am no Lazarus Long; I am more like Milwaukee Short.

A woman in essentially a medieval bikini and fishnets with a magic staff and some sort of fire spell? Happens all the time here in Brookline when men are over fifty.

I am not sure whether this is the same game that features pixellated T&A and promises You can do anything you want, but it looks to be different from Vikings, a game targeted at youngsters who are only over 40.

Which the ads suggest is also a hyperrealistic portrayal of a warlike patriarchal society around the turn of the first millennium AD. The bare female midriffs coupled with weapons guarantees it, as does the targeting to men of a certain age.

An ad on my Facebook feed:

I wonder if they’re pre-soaked in CBD oil?

Oh, and an answer to the title riddle is not so much they both begin with F as They’re places that I don’t go much any more.

We are a long way from 2017, when I joined Family Video.

For some reason, Facebook has been showing me ads for cosplay wings over the last couple of days.

I cannot think what I might have clicked Like on that earned me that market segmentation.

In otter news (ahut), I saw that this guy posted something with an otter in it, and I would have clicked or commented on it, but that’s just reinforcing Facebook’s projected fetish.