DadBlog Pimps and Crayon Physics

I do no pimping on this site for the most part, other than for people that I’m pretty much required to be nice to as a legal matter.

In fact, I think I’m in a tiny minority when it comes to parent bloggers. Surprisingly, I’ve learned over the past year that many parent bloggers view this whole thing as a networking exercise; that blogging is somehow a career-like activity, where the blogger apparently holds out dreams of becoming a kind of oddball semi-interesting internet sensation and possibly cashing in, likely for something stupid like getting fired for blogging, instead of becoming famous for blogging well (aside: I would question the idea that anyone is good enough to actually get paid for parentblogging; it just seems silly). But the network-bloggers think that the appropriate “ends” that they need to achieve is to get as many hits as possible, and they’ll exercise whatever means are necessary to achieve their goal. Others are lonely and want friends. A few others use it like a personal diary, never expecting anyone to really read it. That’s about the universe.

And a few people like me blog mostly for friends, partially to see if anyone out there might also enjoy what we have to say but don't think of it as a second source of income. But we're the minority.

If you start a daddy or mommy blog, the following things will happen to you: (a) you’ll get people who email you and ask you to link to their site; (b) you’ll get people who visit your site and leave comments with the express goal of getting you to visit their site (or maybe they're just really friendly, I can't tell); (c) you’ll get “best of the web” start-ups that get 20 hits a day telling you that you have the “best post of March 16, 2008” (they figure if they do this 365 times, they’ll get at least that many hits in a year); (d) you’ll get some people that will offer to pay you to review their site; (e) you’ll get some commercial enterprises that will try to convince you to link to their site (see below). All this seems incredibly bizarre to me, kind of like when I learned that the nerds in my high school had a social hierarchy not all that dissimilar to the one that the jocks had. The main difference was that the nerd one was so so much more pathetic, because who wanted to climb to the top to be crowned King of the Nerds?

Maybe I’m naïve. I once got a nice email from an outfit called Kobold Toys . It was friendly, they claimed to like my site (not sure if they actually read any of it, but lets give them the benefit of the doubt) and they asked me to link to them and say something nice and, in exchange, they were going to have a portion of their site that linked to blogs. I promptly ignored the email. Looking at other dad blogs a few days later, I stumbled across a dad blogger with a “for sale” sign on his own forehead that, well, decided to play along and actually pretended to have stumbled across this great toy store website and pimped it for them. And then the toy store linked back to his review from their website as if it was all spontaneous instead of orchestrated via email behind the scenes. And then the kobold toys blog stuck his blog on the “blogroll.” It all just struck me as dishonest and sad. People actually taking the time to sell themselves for links. I felt like Jeff Smith learning that Senator Joe Paine is in the party machine’s pocket.

Just looking at the number of google ads out there on blogs that get tiny numbers of hits just kills me; it’s hilarious. It’s the equivalent of someone in your neighborhood putting up a billboard in his front yard, and selling space on his car and on his children’s shirts. I mean, what are you people fucking doing with all this advertising? Why does this seem like a good idea to you, commercializing yourself so you can get $7 checks in the mail each quarter?

This is totally not rock n roll guys.

In any event, I don’t pimp things as a matter of course, but…

… you gotta check out the new game Crayon Physics. WOW this is cool shit.

Although it’s not out yet, I’m quaking with anticipation. My kids and I have spent hours playing the very limited free demo. My son was 4 and had little trouble mastering the concept or the controls (he couldn’t solve it all, but loved creating crap and dropping it on the balls anyway). My 8 year old ran with it.

I'm pre-ordering this thing now. You and your kids gotta try this game. Trust me.

And for the record:

****THIS IS NOT A SLIMY TIT-FOR-TAT OR PAID ADVERTISEMENT****

p.s. Thanksgiving was actually still fun. Although my siblings had to tend to their own children, they were now more into children in general, so they still played with mine and let me be a lazy ass. All in all it was a win-win.