Regional transit and brooding days seem to go hand in hand for me. Here’s another example from yesterday: me going to meet family to celebrate a birthday out west. Way out west. The flipbook movie is about 13 minutes long (out of a 40 minute trip to Oakville), so give it some time to load. Maybe this is a good time to call your mum?
Zach’s post about the G20 kinda freaked me out a bit. Not about the clampdown on the city or anything, I think that’ll be a riot. My main concern is the volume of simultaneous stuff that’ll be happening, and the lack of bodies to attend. Last year I got a request to cover Caribana so I spent the whole day wriggling through a million people in the blistering heat. I had to miss about three other things that day, three things within my highly limited scope of “what’s happening”.
This year the city’s shipping in Euro-crazies for the summer, doing a mayoral throw-down, plus all the other usual seasonal stuff that’s supposed to happen. It’s all a bit overwhelming.
One day at a time.
Have you noticed any changes around here lately, dear reader? I’ve slowly been sneaking stuff onto the site…that TwitPic flip book at the top of the front page, TCLand (current to August 2009, but now there’s Caribana :( ), TCL by Month, the Tumblr site for picture junkies (occasionally with exclusive stuff), various shuffles, re/moves, and additions.
And I’ve added paid advertising. For realsies this time. It’s high time I try to do this thing fulltime because, if I may be honest, a year and a half in I love this blogging thing more than my first day. I entirely agree with most ad networks’ policies that I shouldn’t be asking you to click on any ads. It’s crass, a justifiable reason to get booted off the ad network, and you being the intelligent person you are make the sole and conscious decision to interact with any advertising that appears on this site. I wouldn’t insult you like that.
In order to be entirely transparent about my reasoning behind this effort, you should understand that any revenue that TCL generates goes directly toward helping me pay rent, eat, pay for hosting fees, and all that other stuff that requires money.
Generally speaking, revenue on sites and blogs is generated through the sale of ads, many of which pay when they’re occasionally clicked on. In effect, a a simple click on an ad ends up, via various channels, supporting the site on which it appears. In a very indirect way, the site that loads when a viewer clicks is providing financial assistance to the site carrying the ad. I like to think of this as the credits at the end of a PBS program. Hope you find this information useful.
So yes, I’m selling ad space and I’m getting something together where folks can actually invest in the blog — the idea is for these investments to accrue in value over time (if you believe TCL will accrue value over time, that is), and I’m going to try to get prices down to as low as a buck a pop — $1 – so it might be affordable for you too. I’ll explain how it works later, hopefully it’ll make so much sense that it’ll make your head explode.
But wait, there’s more!
Thanks to an astute twitterer for this gem.
The general consensus on this seems to be: when it gets its own Ministry of Silly Walks.
The fact that is was cloudy and kinda misty and foggy on Saturday was so apropos.
That little pot rally that happened at Yonge-Dundas Square about a week ago was basically just practice for the main event, the Global Marijuana March and Freedom Festival. The point of the march, as far as I can fathom it, is to demonstrate the futility of existing pot prohibitions. It originally started as a grass roots (haha!) movement but now, well, the word “festival” is appropriate if you ask me. Even if you’re completely against anything marijuana, you must admit that arresting everyone simply wouldn’t be practical. Maybe even possible.
... with pictures
... with sounds
... with videos
... with opinions
... that's shorter
... that's longer