John Guilfoil's Blog
I actually got yelled at by a girl last week for not using the right cat litter for my boys.
I had been using Tidy Cats, and she said that I need to be using a natural cat litter and that the one I was using would give them cancer and give me cancer and that it’s bad for the environment.
My response: “yeah, and it doesn’t clump well either.”
This one is a long time coming.
A lot of people are discounting the current financial crisis, saying that the average American isn’t seeing the problem “in their own wallet.”
My generation, the 18-30-somethings out there now, have been suffering through the last eight years more than we know, and I realized that as soon as I graduated from college.
The highest percentage of Americans ever is currently attending college, but financial aid just hasn’t been there for many.
And I do not count federal loans as financial aid. Those are exactly what they claim to be: loans, from the government, that you have to pay back, with interest.
So we’re all going to school, absorbing the loan debt because accountants and financial professionals are saying “it’s good debt.”
My primary degree is in journalism. My job offers upon graduation ranged from $25,000 to $35,000, and now I freelance my ass off to try to make a living as I put myself through grad school (more loans and “good debt”) so that I can have a graduate degree and one day teach in my field.
I am making better than that $35,000 a year we just talked about between freelancing and a little bit from Blast, but let me give you the run down that the average recent college grad living in Massachusetts has to deal with:
Monthly expenses:
Rent:Â $1,000
Electric and gas (landlady won’t pay):Â $100Â
Cell phone: $120 ($99/month unlimited? yeah, right, Verizon)
Cable and internet:Â $120 ($69/month?!? yeah, right, Comcast)
Federal student loans:Â $140
MEFA/ACS student loans: $140 and parents pay $500/month for now (thank you mom and dad)Â
Credit cards (personal): $300
Credit cards (Blast/business): $150
Auto insurance: $60
Renter’s insurance:Â $20
Groceries:Â $200
Health insurance:Â $200Â (part-timers pay more!)
Monthly:Â $2,550
Yearly:Â $30,600Â
Now, let’s add gas to the equation. Thankfully, the Boston Globe does pay my mileage when I’m on assignments, so let’s call that half.
Gas:Â $300/month – $150 = $150 * 12 = $1,800/year
So before I go out, have a beer, see a movie, buy cat food for my little monsters or do really anything else, about $30,000 is already spent.
For a lot of people, forget working at a non-profit or pursuing your art or taking a year off to volunteer or do what you “want” to do.Â
Now, I’m not starving or out on the street, but that’s $30k gone just to live! My my parents weren’t there to pay that $6,000/year, I don’t know what I’d do. My point is, I graduated from college with a mortgage! But I can’t see how someone can classify that as “good debt” because I can’t sell the “house!” And if everyone is going to go to college by default this generation, that piece of paper that says “Bachelor” on it is going to be as worthless as my high school diploma.
So, like Wall Street, my investments are over-inflated and decreasing in value.
But my debts aren’t.Â
Bailout please?
I have really loved using WordPress to power BlastMagazine.com, but I have been having two huge problems lately.
First, we do not use WordPress Widgets. We use WAY too many plugins and have about 15 different variations of a sidebar on Blast, so we aren’t using Widgets. But it seems like everyone is converting the best plugins to “Widget only” — that sucks for us and I get the feeling there’s a lot of actual bloggers out there that havne’t assimilated to the Widget world yet.Â
My question: How do you manually insert/activate/use a Widget in a sidebar or a page without activating the dynamic/widget sidebar function?Â
Number two: Importing text for dummies.
Blast has about 20 different people who insert articles or blog on the site. Many of them are not web savvy. But the two most common ways writers send us stories is by email (Gmail usually) and in Microsoft Word .doc (or that stupid .docx) format.Â
The problem that leaves us with is that Gmail takes pasted text and inserts random linebreaks all over the place and Microsoft Word inserts all kinds of crazy crap, code, fonts, sizes, etc, etc, etc. I’ve training my editors on how to use the “Paste from Word” function, but even that’s not filtering out all of the MS Word garbage now.
Oh, and we could really use a good multi-author plugin that integrates to the post editor and lets us assign multiple authors to a single post…
Perhaps in an effort to focus on their next whimsical British superhero alternate reality flop, the (half) brains at the Sci Fi Channel have decided to cancel Stargate Atlantis.
The network, instead of continuing the show that gave them their highest ratings ever when it launched 2004, will finish off Stargate Atlantis with — surprise surprise — a bunch of TV and straight-to-dvd movies.
That thump you just heard was my lifeless body landing somewhere off a tall building.
This is really stupid. And, yes I’ll say it, the last straight-to-dvd Stargate movie sucked. Stargate Continuum was supposed to be this epic way to end Stargate SG-1, and instead all we got was something that was either too long for a single episode or way too short for a two-parter and DEFINITELY not something cinematic and movie-like.
Okay, maybe “sucked” is unfair, because it was still Stargate SG-1, and gets points for that. It was very poorly edited and should have had much more storyline and development. I mean, Ba’al, the main badguy, is killed halfway through, before his nefarious plan can come to fruition. Needed more drama and gloom and doom.
Insider moment that only fans will understand: What if Ba’al’s plan worked? All the system lords were defeated, the Jaffa got their freedom, earth got left alone, Jack’s kid was still alive, and everything was beautiful. Let all that happen and then something catastrophic can go wrong, like Anubis, replicators and priors come at the same time (or any combination of the three) and wrecks shit up or something? Then they have to team up with Ba’al again and defeat the much worse common enemy. NO, they ended Continuum with what? With what? An EXECUTION! Celebrating death. Ba’al may have been the least bad of all the system lords, but SG-1 made it a point to mark his death with a grand celebration. Awful.
I hope that producer Brad Wright and company will learn from this and realize that you can go over the 1:30 mark for a feature film — It’s okay, no one is going to get mad at you for it.
Finally, just to complete my bitter rampage at MGM, (owners of the Stargate franchise) I am very concerned that Stargate Universe, the planned third Stargate series, is going to be god-awful. It already sounds like “Enterprise.”
“Universe” takes place in a long-lost ancient spaceship, exploring the galaxy. It’s already been said that the new show does not contain elements or characters from SG-1 or Atlantis, so kiss Ben Browder goodbye — he seems to really want to be involved in Stargate. He was a late addition to SG-1, but a lot of fans came to like him, especially fans that joined late in the running.
Some science fiction fans remember that Fox tried to “US military explores space in the present time or not-too-distant future” in the 90s with Space: Above and Beyond, which barely made it through a single season (but I liked it just the same).
MGM, Sci Fi, Wright: you, sirs, have an extremely high bar set for yourselves. I am very concerned.