Bravo Channel in the late 90's Changed Me.

 

Cable TV needed something, and that something was Bravo.

    Late in the cycle of the VHS era, TV ushered in fresh new content in an attempt to breathe fresh life into the platform of basic cable. You may have had 40-50 channels, but often times at night, nothing was on. If you wanted to watch movies, you had to pay for those channels. After 10pm, most channels went to infomercials, paid programming, or just turned off completely. In those times, Bravo bailed out the night owls with some unique perspective. This channel had the market cornered on random and obscure, and I was here for it. 

Art, music, movies - uncensored

     For the first time you could tune in to a channel with very limited commercials, with breaks and channel programming announced by a melodic deep voice with dreamy transitions. There was a new or old live recording of Cirque Du Soleil on damn near every night. Live concerts, movies only screened at Cannes film festival, and weekends of rare london underground punk movies complete with nudity and violence. My step mother got me into enjoying theatre, so you can imagine my surprise when over the holidays there was a Broadway marathon including CATS- something I did not see live until around college age.

Early 90's punk nouveau film was common

    I was introduced to independant and low budget cinema from watching Bravo past 2am on a weekdays. Films that would never find their way to America got limited viewing and promotion; rare back then. Trainspotting would come on at midnight, London Kills me at 2am, and Blue Juice at 3:45. I worked nights, never slept. This level of chaotic programming was right up my alley and expanded what I knew about international and foreign movies, which at the time as basically nothing. 

Top quality movies, explained

     I have a fond memory of an experience I owe to my girlfriend at the time, who was out of town, calling me to tell me to tune into Bravo. There was a movie that I would like on, you should watch it. We ended up on the phone for over an hour watching the greater part of The Name of the Rose starring Sean Connery. My first watch, but I had read the Umberto Ecco book before, but it had been a while. I had no idea this movie existed, and we watched it on the phone together in silence until the breaks where we speculated what was going to happen next. What a rare treat at the time to catch something as meaningful and as profound as this movie on basic cable at the ripe old age of 15. The commercial breaks were minimal, complete with subdued lighting and noise. Before the movie resumed, a narrator explained the differences between the movie and the book, and speculated director choices. After the movie, there was an interview with Umberto Ecco. This was peak nerd shit, I'm telling you. I was fucking hooked. 

Rare documentary's on obscure album creation

     I learned so much about music. I had no idea Frida had her own album that she launched solo in the early 80's, let alone the fact that Phil Collins wrote and performed the whole thing, did all the work, and really just did not get along with the ABBA alum.. but here we are at 1:30am watching a whole retrospective about how the music was made. Down the rabbit hole we go as the next 5 hours of programming were devoted to live Genesis performances synced to pictures and videos of art and people dancing. Strange but powerful. The arts shape the young mind, and so I was indeed molded to be interested in media I did not wholly understand. 

TLDR; Bravo was a way normal people in America could be cultured in the 90's without breaking the bank, and consume media that you never knew existed. 

My first REAL Gaming Rig - Playing Wow in 2005

 

This was a beast back then, and I'll explain why.

     In 2005 I was already over a year into playing World of Warcraft with my wife. I use to own a small but well known PC Repair Business, which I sold my controlling stake to a friend, so I had no shortage of old and aging PC parts, monitors, keyboards, etc. Really common in the business sector at the time was Pentium 3 Coppermine gateway computers, so I had tons of them laying around. There was a well known FAQ how to get an extra 200-300mhz out of them, and really get them screaming for zero dollars spent. I had an entire box of used Geforce 2-4 video cards, so this was the PC's we rocked at the time for many, many years:

• Gateway Moo-moo box
• Pentium 3 Coppermine T, Overclocked to the tits
• Geforce 4 MMX (or shittier 2/3)
• 512mb ram
• Random sound card
• Random junk monitor

This would be an exact example of what my wife and I gamed on for a loooong time

     We had just moved into our first real house, and we wanted a baby, so money was super tight. I started taking computer jobs again out of the house. Replacing broken modems, selling parts, replacing hard drivers, easy stuff. Our Pentium 3's just screaming away in the office room in the front of the house, still playing WoW on 17 inch monitors. A big job got dumped in my lap from someone I use to get a lot of work from, these huge Dell Dimension Business Class PC's from 2005, brand new, four of them total. They needed to be set up, office installed.. nothing crazy. He dropped the PC's off to me, then came back to grab them about a week later, but with no payment. He promised to pay me in a month, next week, you name it. Needed it right now, and how important it was. We talked over a beer, and next thing you know, in lieu of payment, he offered me one of these brand new PC's. The specs:

• Dell Dimension Business E500 series?
• Pentium D (early Dual Core!) 3ghz
• 1.5GB Ram
• Dual AMD 1900XT Video Cards (why!?)
• Two hard drives
• Random Tape backup drive under DVD rom

    Insane luck. I needed the money, but I wanted this so much more. Instantly went from everything on Low settings and taking minutes to boot, to having the best of everything. This PC got me all the way to playing Skyrim in 2011, and beyond. A friend hooked me up with an old viewsonic 21 inch CRT as he was going the LCD route, and I took it in trade for some work. I was all of a sudden a high-end gamer, and it forever changed my outlook on having a high end gaming PC. For it's day, I did not know many people that even had performance video cards, the market was so small. PC gamers were the huge minority, and many games were just not available, or hard to get. I would later sell this PC, and use a free Core 2 Quad, which I bought two of from the State Library Auction, but that's a story for another day. 

Note: Before you say a Pentium 3 was not good enough, here is a picture from the original manual. We played on dialup by the way!

Dish Network DVR in the early 2000's Was a Game Changer

 

There is a story here, I promise.

     When looking at old Snakepeople.net posts I made in highschool and in college, I came across the picture above; it's me wearing a Powerglove, pretending to stab my friend Chrys in the face. I owned two Powergloves, neither worked, and Chrys was never a fan. We needed content for the website that was actually getting around 10k hits a month, and I thought this would be a good idea. One thing really stood out to me, made me really go back to that time, and that was the random set top box in the background of a 25 year old picture... a Dish Network DVR.

It's better than you think.

     My dad owned a Radio Shack growing up, so we always had all the coolest doo-dads and bootleg shit laying around the house. When Satellite TV via Dish Network came out and demo units from them became available, he signed up early. I talked him into getting the DVR for my room at the astronomical price of $50 per month. This is the days of Dial-up guys, like 2000-2001. I was still living at home, going to school part time and working part time while my parents were planning their retirement. $50 a month then was easily like $100 a month or more today, so I'm not sure why he said yes, even if they had the money. I was always surprised about the things he would accept and reject, but technology he would always splurge and ask questions later.. which I appreciated. 

This shit was insane.

     I went from having like 40 grainy channels in my room to hundreds overnight. I could select up to two channels at once, and it would record one, and I could watch the other. While watching a show, I could save snips of movies (nude scenes, gore, explosions, quotes) just a few seconds at a time, and save them in folders. For the first time I experienced on-demand movies and TV shows, rewinding live TV, and even playing some really limited games on the remote provided. What's crazy: It worked. It was fast. Like instant- no wait. Click the record button, red light clicks on, saves it quickly with zero effort. Within a month my Dad had found someone at the flea market to sell him a card to get full access to everything on the menu of programs, 999 channels. Pay per view. Porn of all types. Sports and international TV. I thought the internet was cool, but this was next fucking level cool. For other reasons, I went through a strange period of my life in that time, alienating friends and loved ones, depressed. The TV and internet were my only escape during those dark times. I estimate each day I watched 2-5 movies per day, every day, for around a year. I attached myself to certain actors, directors, writers.. Endlessly consuming media and creating websites, writing stories, and attempting to learn new skills alone while working nights at a gas station. I went through a break-up, saved lots of money, and emerged on the other side a different person- driven and slightly insane. Maybe that's a story for another time?

     For that next year I continued to live at home and this magical contraption was always the center of attention. There was always something on. Having friends over? Throw them the remote and they would be sitting there for hours just playing around and mesmerized; totally changing the way they thought about consuming media and TV. It was not until several years later that live channels and such on the internet with Sopcast would take me away from Satellite and Cable bootleg television. 

    It's worth noting that Chrys is now a successful TV and Movie lighting and electrical engineer, proud father and husband, and overall just a smart dude that did well for himself.

The Venerable RTX 2080

I've had this thing forever.

     A little history: I bought my RTX 2080 OC on launch day for $849 from Best Buy. It had been years since I bought a card on launch day, and I wanted the best, and the RTX 2080 was the IT card at the time. I had an aging 1070 that performed perfectly, and is still hard at work in the PC next to me my son uses for school, paired with my old 8700k.. chugging along just fine.

The lineup at the time.

     I had no idea that I would have been better off with the GTX 1080ti. I was told by Nvidia and their marketing department that the card would have ray tracing and 8GB of their new memory would be enough. For $300 less dollars, I could have got the 1080ti, but I wanted the new hot performing card. 

I was lied to.

     The numbers came out no sooner than I got the card home and in my PC. The 1080ti with a mild overclock and a fan on it would easily beat the shit out of the 2080, and later, they added RTX support for the card. It was looking like I was had, and I paid too much. Relegated to my fate, I made the best of it, and overclocked the dogshit out of the poor 2080 for the next 4 years. 

This is a 2080 after 4 years of overclocking.

I gamed on this card like it was my last. If I'm paying $849 for something that was beat by a previous generation, so be it. I started competitive Overwatch in 2018, and went top 500 for almost a year in FFA, and you can imagine what that does to a card. There are chinese bitcoin miner rigs that have less hours on their cards than my poor 2080 does. 

This is for beginners.

     I'm still salty. I've since built several PC's for my gaming family, and upgraded my own PC, and now we have two 30 series GPU's in the house that out perform the 2080, but not in my PC.. no way. I'm stubborn, and this fucking nerd is going to extract every ounce of longevity out of this card; so I did what at PC enthusiast would do, I repasted the die, put new thermal pads on, and replaced the whining dead fans with new OEM ones... then cranked it up to 11. For the next year and a half, I ran the card on the ragged edge, even going so far to buying an after market GPU socket fan to blow even more air on the card, and mounting a high performance fan on the side to hopefully exhaust even more of the hot air away.

New year.. same me.

     Now its the middle of 2024, and I just took my PC apart to clean it, and guess what, the 2080 is still in there, chugging along, overclocked to the moon and screaming during my extended playthrough of the new Robocop game with DLSS on. On epic settings, still over 100fps, fans on 91% of max, sitting at 77c temps under load. I'll be honest, I did not think this card would last 6 full years dialed up to 11. Like I mentioned, I have a slot fan and a blow fan aimed directly at it at all times and have done some work on it to keep it alive, but I never expected this kind of value from a card that no one wanted, and no one should have bought. After years of eSports and every triple A title from the last 6 years, this card has performed amazing, and never left me feeling like I needed to upgrade right away. My son's new PC, which is a 14700k with a 4070ti is light years ahead of my 10700k rig, but I still don't feel like I'm missing anything. I played 80 hours of Baldur's Gate at 100fps on epic settings very recently with zero issues or crashes. I've made up my mind, I'm going to wait until the 50 series drops, and get a 40 series card on sale and move on with my life.. but I wanted to share how my mistake turned into one of the best gaming choices of my adult life. 

I took a little break, and killed the ads.

My PC after only 2 minutes and 12 seconds of viewing Google's auto ads feature

     I'll start off by saying I killed the ads on all my blogs. Yes, they were making me around $10-12 per month, but I could not even stand to look at the page. I know I had to take a break from posting, so I thought.. "Hey, if I don't have to post or look at it for a while, maybe it can at least make me some money...", and it did. Bad move, and I'm sorry. I would have left them up a little longer to be honest, until I had a run-in with the Google Adsense police.

My son's youtube page. Click to view his strange horror related content. 

     My son has a youtube channel (pictured above) that does pretty well, and he qualified to earn on his views. He is really pumped about his sudden popularity, so I made him an Adsense account and got the process started. Within a week, Google demanded I delete my personal Adsense account. My son and I have the same name, and live at the same address, so we must be the same person, so one duplicate account must go. I pleaded with them, asked them several times to review it, but there was zero human element to the choice made and I decided to delete my account, so my son could get his little income stream going. What horseshit, but I'm willing to do it for the dude. 

Why did I take a break? Lot's going on during an event season at work, new responsibilities, and had to spend some time with my wife off the clock. Writing the blog is a hobby for me, but I was spending a little too much time on the computer after work on nothing, so had to reel that in. Hadn't washed the truck or got to my honey-do list for a while. Either way, I'm going to attempt to balance my time better and give the blog a little love over the weekend. 

Cheers!

I created a blog and got 500k views.

Look at all those views.. but who cares?

      I think this should be some kind of milestone that most blogs strive to accomplish. I've done some research on this subject, with people asking other successful bloggers.. "How do I get to X point and make money on my blog?" In my case, it cost me zero dollars, has net me very little money, and took over 10 years. It should be noted that in the last two years I've earned the lion's share of the unique views with my new posting schedule; who knew that when you post, people would read it!

Some Blog Stats

• #1 SFW post - Col. Sanders is the best twitch streamer at 7390 views
• Fastest to 4k views - Employment, beer and other things
• Hottest Topic - Movies
• Average post views - 4183
• Number of posts total - 417
• Dollars earned - $94
• Dollars spent - 0
• Number of posts about the movie Legend - 4
• Average views per month - 21834
• Number of redesigns - 1
• Number of times I said I like tits - 9

     I suppose we could ask ourselves.. who cares? I've found myself checking views here and there, but for the most part, I never look. I do get excited when I get a comment or email adding to the conversation. I have another blog that gets much higher engagement, so that fills the need for the interaction that I crave. The blog is just my outlet for whatever I'm reading about or what I'm interested about at that moment in time. Beers get consumed, I want to vent to someone and talk to a friend, and because I've moved so much, I don't really have any of those. The blog has helped me on more than one occasion feel better about my situation, and myself. A peak under the hood- I spend about 15 minutes per post, I don't research what I want to write about, and I just keep a few windows open so I can google things and copy links.. it's about as low effort as it can be without looking actually low effort. Writing blogs is kinda my thing and I've been doing it since the mid-90's before it even had a name. 

Thank you.

    Thank you to all the repeat visitors and new visitors who have supported me and read the blog over the years. Seriously, I fucking mean it. This is your blog and I made it for both of us. I wish I had some more interesting things to say that does not have anything to do with beer, work and robot tits, but hey, thems the brakes. My hobby is collecting books, so if you want to hear/read about me actually put time and money into posts, you can head down that way, to First Edition Fantasy. I don't post frequently, but when I do, there is typically a lot of time and effort, custom pictures and going out into the market to find books to talk about. Buying books, driving, and taking pictures as well as researching values and topics all take multiple hours. Anyways! Thanks again for listening to my rants, and keep coming back to see what will randomly pop into my head next. 

Stray Thought - What is considered a "popular" blog?

   Is it average readership people are looking for? Dollars earned? Followers?

     My average readership is between 3000-5000 unique visitors per post. I would trade 500 reads/views for a few comments and interaction, some conversation with my viewers. That could be my fault. I never ask anyone a question, or review something and ask people what they think in the comments below. My other blog that I have not updated in 4 years gets tons of comments and not nearly the readership. There is a balance there, and I'm not sure what it is. 

     Adsense is another way to judge a popular blog. I show very little ads, and its mostly on mobile because I don't have to look at them. I leave the auto-ads on, and just ignore it. I get an email from google each day with how many impressions I get and ignore that as well. How much does this readership pay per month you ask?

    

   I whopping 13.80! 73 people clicked on things last month, one of those people bought something and there you go, 13.80. I've read on reddit r/blogs weekly about people asking what it takes to get a better blog. It's not the look, trust me. I've done that. It's the content and constant posting. Do something that you like, take your own pictures when you can. The magic of my book blog works so well because its 100% me, I don't take pictures or content from anyone else.

    I put a ton of effort in to the design and look of my book blog. I wanted it to be inviting and warm like an old leather chair, with a stack of books in the corner. I used backgrounds blended together and hand picked fonts. I tried different looks, don't get me wrong. I had a dark cartoonish fantasy book case look previously, and asked various critics to pick it apart. This blog was the result of that trial and error.

    

    The readership is.. Meh. When I went off the rails and went flea market hunting, I saw big gains, and links from other places all over the internet who loved to come along with me. I struck gold with "First Edition Hunt" posts where I just gave a value and how to tell if your book is a certain edition. Those were the most popular over time, and still get visited frequently. 

    So one last time we ask the question.. how do you know if it's successful? I think the answer is harder to gauge than you think. I get a lot of thrill from the comments section, so my heart is in the comments. But from the sheer numbers of readership, you do get a little bump to your ego.. don't get me wrong. In the end,  let your heart decide.. then twist that heart until it's black and money pours out of it.