One year ago today: November 16, 2019, Windows 98 was faster.
Five years ago today: November 16, 2015, five bucks & still yuck.
Nine years ago today: November 16, 2011, didgeridoo
Random years ago today: November 16, 2003, Alaska Airlines fail.
This chilly morning meant the doggies wore sweaters. I declined to take a picture, on principle. It’s the logic, if I don’t need a parka, the dogs can romp along. Nope, on my own, I don’t put sweaters on any animals that have a natural covering. Then again, I don’t feed them cooked meals either. No sense wasting resources. Myself, I got a jacket. We Florida types don’t own things like long-sleeved shirts. Everybody’s on about Thanksgiving already. And I’m on a diet. If I go out that day at all, it’ll likely be Denny’s. No, hold on, if I’m in Miami, there’s a great oven in the condo. Stand by while I grab a coffee, or I’ll be all over the place.
The trim is decidely a two-people operation unless you have a lot of sheep-shearing experience. An hour later, all we got was his paws, his belly, and around his butt. Left unattended, this dog’s low ground clearance means your sofa will quickly resemble the neighbor’s weed patch gone to seed.
We put on the audio tape after walkies so the pets could conk out. Hannah, our protagonist and cookie baker seems to be the only woman, single or otherwise, who did not sneak out the back door of the movie director’s mansion on wheels. The plot is treads the fine path between stale and shopworn, with the murderer replacing the toy pistol with the real McCoy. Said director gets whacked demonstrating a scene. Since he stepped into the set, was the bullet meant for him? We’ll know within 270 minutes becasue we just finished tape five.
It was 50ºF and to me that’s sub-zero. I fell into a sleep that woud not shake off, a sure sign I need the warmer weather to function. And it is only a couple hours drive from here. Hey, this is weighty circumstances. I could be back here in no time and I also fell asleep to the doggie’s medicine time, feeding, and afternoon walk. Things like that I cannot be doing if I’m pet sitting all by myself.
And I see it did not take big media long after their election headlines to switch back to the constant background of nonsense news. Nonsense because it is designed to keep the sheeple thinking their biggest problems are space junk, global warming, and “right wing” tweets. Keept them blindfolded while they lose their jobs, their freedoms, and their neighborhoods. This is why I find it so hard to feel sorry for stupid people. They love to set up foundations to feed the poor but not foundations to eradicate poverty.
Emma Watson’s shins.
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Further investigation with the stock photo agencies has me stil interested in the concept. Breakfast Stock Club, the first one I researched, turns out to be only a how-to outfit. it’s in the fine print way down the page near the free trial offers. They are akin to the people who sell you books about how to become a best-selling author, mostly advice you don’t need since it would place you in direct competition with the minions. These days a slow rise to the top is risky business. Like show biz, you need andangle. I don’t have one, but here are some recent photos taken with my camcorder to demo my technique.
Moving on to real sites, I find the like of Shutterstock, Getty, Stocksy, and Dreamstime. These are the AOLs whose watermarked images you have to scroll past no matter how many times or ways your search specifies “free”. My opinion on such millennial bullsh does not change just because some of them may soon become useful. What I cannot find is a basis to clearly compare their rates, which are mostly commissions. It is determined by a host of items a beginner or non-professional photographer likely does not know, many of which have sweet zot to do with quality. Most pay more if you sign on exclusively.
The pay scales I compared were for non-exclusive, lowest rates of commission, as follows:
Dreamstime: 25% per photograph, growing with volume.
IStock: 15% per photograph
Shutterstock: 25% per photograph, sold by subscription service.
Offset: $249 per photograph, very demanding of quality.
Yay: 50% per photograph.
Creative Market: 75% but you set your own prices.
Getty: 20% per photograph, sold by size (take big pictures!)
Stocksy: $15 per small photograph & up.
Cavan: 50% per photograph, high standards.
Pond5: 50% per photograph.
Westend61: 85% of each “profit”.
DepositPhotos: 34% per photograph & up.
Fotolia: 33% per photograph.
It is hardly easy, which is par for what the Internet has done to startups. My long-term readers may recollect my views on the lawn maintenance business. Too much ease of market entry, you will constantly be undercut by those spending borrowed money to break into the business. Before you cover the same ground as myself, read Shotkit. You may have to submit 6,000 photos per month to make a living at it. That’s 200 per day. Roughly ten times what I manage with this blog. Any more becomes a job. The photos have to be sifted and sorted, and you’ve heard me lament my lack of a photo filing system. Look at this one. Classify it. Not so easy, huh?
This idea will move slowly around here. There is always beginner’s luck, so I may consider simply parking my photos in some server rather than my spare hard drive. I’ve downloaded what I hope is a typical contract, this one from a company called Alamy. My guesstimate on this opportunity is about par with finding a guitar player with a brain.
Here’s some additional info:
Shutterstock: rarely pays more than 25₵ per photo.
iStock: 20-50₵ per sale, earnings vary wildly.
Dreamstime: 34₵ per photo
Depositphotos: averages 30₵ per photo.
And before we close up, Congress has announced that there is no President Elect. All those scenes you see with Biden in front of a banner proclaiming “Office of the President-Elect” are fake. There is no such office. One sixth of the votes in one Nevada consituency have been voided, stating a “large scale discrepancy”. That’s 154,000 Biden votes down the tube. And in Georgia, things are not looking much better. Batches of votes are still showing up and election officias are being asked to step down. Big media is suffering huge stock value declines and AT&T is osing a fortune on CNN.
ADDENDUM
Is Mars a “free planet”? Or will the first arrivals be subject to Earth’s idiotic systems? Elon Musk, with me on his side, says Mars should be free to the first settlers to start over. I agree, this has been the basis for most new and successful countries on Earth. They left the bureaucrats and pomp behind. It takes 200 years for rot like liberalism to take root. I suspect Musk is very aware of what sorts of people he does not want on his spaceships. As far as I’m concerned, thanks to the feather-bedding at NASA, let Musk have the whole planet. That’s how the real estate market works.
I would like to see the passenger lists. Naturally, many obscure “experts” on space law, whatever that is, have glommed onto this opportunity for publicity. Their mouthpiece is the aptly named Professer Funk. My understanding is that only countries who signed on, not private individuals, are subject to certain space treaties. It’s moot whether those semi-voluntary conditions would extend to a country’s citizens. I do not feel bound by any such laws beyond the Moon, and only then due its potential as a missile base.
Funk, sure enough, after a prolonged silence (you know the type), has suddenly appeared to announce there are grave issues following Musk’s declaration. Atta boy, Funk, pricks like you come out of the woodwork everywhere once someone else has taken a stance on anything. Funk makes his big play for his 15 minutes, and that was hopefully it. I just don’t like AOLs that stick their nose into other people’s business. If it was Funk making the first landing, he’d change sides at warp speed.
I’m struggling with the new smart phone. It isn’t the phone itself, but the massive chore of disabling what you don’t want. I don’t want most of it. Deleted apps now number over 110 and I still can’t give the heave-ho to them annoying Google notices. If I want play services, I’ll ask for play services, and that includes all the useless-to-me apps that require it. Did you get that, Taylor and Brandon? Nor do I care for these alerts that come in anytime they please, like when I’m napping.
Suspicion is that the people who use all these features do so by attrition. They buy the phone, discover there is no manual on how to delete all the shit and it takes a bit of know-how to even cut down on the bullshit volume. So instead, they join ‘em. What a fine lot of leaders they’ll make.
