Am I John Connor?

Do you ever feel like John Connor or is it just me?

It feels like lately any time there’s something that I do that involves an algorithm making a decision, the algorithm goes against me. Whether that’s posting a video (separate rant entirely!), or posting a comment, or placing an advertisement, or writing an article, the bots always seem to come up with something.

It’s never because there’s a reason. The excuse produced by the algorithm is always invalid and not applicable. But I probably used the wrong keyword, or had the wrong IP address, or exhibited “bot-like behavior” because I type so ridiculously fast (40 years of typing experience), or because my vocabulary is too large, or any of a thousand things that makes me not appear to 100% adhere to the “average, standard Human” that algorithms expect.

I am not good at bullshitting. I’m annoyingly honest, because making stuff up is EXHAUSTING and I just don’t have the patience for it. My style is to tell you what’s up, give a (hopefully concise) explanation, and get on with my day or whatever I was creating. So, the idea that a bot would flag me for “deceptive statements” or “misleading links” is doubly offensive. First, your bot is stupid. Second, that’s not something I’d even try to do.

Google/YouTube, Facebook, and every other platform: Fix your half-assed algorithms. You’re making the world a worse place with them. Stop being evil.

I expect that this problem will only get worse as the internet becomes mostly just robots lying about things. Before “AI”, this was already tough. Now it’s probably going to become impossible. It’s hard enough to get a tech support Human now. As companies hand over more and more of their business to algorithms, Human support is pretty much going to disappear.

The thought that I might be the one to defeat the AI apocalypse gives me a lot of hope for the future.

Wishlist Into The Inferno on Steam Today!

Into The Inferno is a retro-style grid-based first-person dungeon crawler RPG. Battle monsters and increase your skills in order to rescue a group of children from a horde of demons.

Battling snakes in Into The Inferno.

Battling snakes in Into The Inferno.

I’ve had a lot of fun working on this game, and it’s something I’ve been dreaming of for years. I must admit I really enjoy playing it, and now it’s in the “polishing and tuning” stage with an expected release in early fall.

Walking through town in Into The Inferno.

Walking through town in Into The Inferno.

Wishlist it on Steam today!

Log 15: Added Shops and New UI Style to Into The Inferno

Here I demonstrate a bunch of progress — new things like character creation, shops, an inn where you can save your game, a mana recharger, and a new style for the user interface.

I also made a small change to the graphics – a new floor and ceiling style. I’m in the process of customizing the dungeon graphics, and plan to show an update on that in the next demo video.

Disabling Automatic Closing Braces in Visual Studio Code

I really like Visual Studio Code as an editor, but it has some annoying defaults.

When working in C# (and a lot of other languages), it tries to be “helpful” by automatically adding closing braces, brackets, and parentheses when you type the opening ones.

An Automatic Closing Brace

Automatic closing brace added when typing an opening brace.

For some people, this is great. For me, no. It just doesn’t work with my typing and coding style, and ends up being something that gets in the way and I have to move or remove later.

Fortunately it’s easy to turn this off.

Go to File –> Preferences –> Settings

Search for “auto closing brackets”.

Change “Editor: Auto Closing Brackets” to “never”.

Auto Closing Brackets Setting

Turning off the auto closing brackets setting.

Problem solved. Happy coding!

Seasonal Website Advertising Income Differences (Monthly RPM Changes)

I’ve been running advertising-supported websites for about 15 years now, primarily music-related.

I typically notice a decline in income at the beginning of the year, and a spike in income toward the end of the year. My audience is international, but the majority of visitors are from the USA and to a lesser extent other English-speaking countries.

I gathered up the data on my historical earnings for the last three years and charted how much income changes throughout the year on average. Using January as a baseline, this is how things change throughout the year:

Month Earnings vs. January Pageviews vs. January
January 0% 0%
February -2.2% -9.9%
March -2.0% -3%
April -6.1% +6.6%
May -15.0% -0.4%
June -18.0% -15.7%
July -16.1% -17.0%
August -6.8% -21.0%
September -4.4% -38.6%
October +2.5% -8.0%
November +16.3% -4.1%
December +26.6% -3.2%

What’s clear and obvious is that income is heavily impacted by the holiday season.

Something else that I didn’t realize is how much both traffic and earnings drop during the North American summer and early fall. I think this a sort of “go out and play” influence — I tend to get less traffic on days when people are out with friends in the evening or otherwise on vacation. People tend to spend less time working on music and looking for tools to make that music when they’re out playing music in clubs or at parties.

That’s my theory, at least.

Of course, this is a sample size of one person (across two sites) over three years, so there will be a significant margin of error. Nevertheless, I still find it interesting.