Sasha Is a Monster

My apartment complex switched its cable provider last week. The new cable folks came in, switched out the old cable box and put in theirs. They also took my old DVR. I have to go pick up my new one from the new cable company’s offices. I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Unexpected side effect: I read a lot more now.

It’s not that I don’t have cable TV anymore. I do. It’s just that I no longer have 200 hours of my favorite shows, taped and indexed and accessible at any time. There seems to be so little value in turning on that picture box and staring at whatever happens to be taking place on one of the 9000 channels, especially since 80% of the time it’s a commercial and only 0.05% of the time is it Girl Meets Gown.

I was an early adopter of TiVo, and I always argued that DVRs wouldn’t make people watch more TV; they would just allow people to watch TV more efficiently. I may have just disproved my own point.

(Side note: In 2005, one of my business professors told the class that TiVo was an unsustainable, essentially undifferentiated business model and that the company would be irrelevant in five years, once the DVR concept had been adopted by the mass market. We all gasped. We made arguments against his point for an hour. His position was unthinkable. TiVo was God. This is why he was the professor and we were the students. It’s a lesson I’ve seen played out time and again now in disruptive technology: Don’t be the company that trains the market.)

Anyway. I’m reading Emily Gould’s And the Heart Says Whatever. She’s brillz and I love her. During her Gawker days, she mainstreamed the genre of the overshare, a style of writing I’ve practiced professionally for several years now. Emily still does it better than anyone. If you enjoy reading SIAM — or if you liked the early days of Evil Beet when it was still 50% gossip, 50% my wretched, early-20s personal life — you’ll love this book.

And, hey, if you’re one of those people who lurks on my websites and occasionally leaves bitter, anonymous comments about how I don’t need to discuss every miniscule, navel-gazing thought in my head with the entire world, please read Emily’s book. It will explode your head and then you won’t be able to comment here anymore. AND THEN EVERYONE WINS.

Oh, no, wait. Emily and I win. You lose.

First off, THANK YOU to all of you who have been reading/commenting on my Seattle 2.0 pieces. I think my pieces get more comments than anyone else’s! It’s so amazing and exciting when you guys leave comments and it really does mean the world to me.

That said, you should read my new post, up today. It’s called “Your Company’s Video Isn’t Going Viral, So Please Stop Trying,” and you can read it here. It offers some more inside insights into what goes on behind-the-scenes on Evil Beet and how I consult for other startups.

If you feel moved to comment/retweet, it’d be much appreciated.

Tonight I heard Vanessa Fox speak at an event for the Seattle Direct Marketing Association. Vanessa Fox is like the goddess of search engine marketing. She worked at Google for a long time, starting as a technical writer and eventually creating Google Webmaster Central as a way for webmasters to learn more about how Google viewed and indexed their websites. Now she consults for small businesses — like the U.S. government — on how to improve their search strategies. She’s basically my hero. I was soooo excited to hear her speak. I assumed the event would be packed wall-to-wall, but somehow news of the event hadn’t gotten out to the Seattle tech community. I only heard about it through Vanessa’s own Twitter account. I didn’t recognize anyone there (except the people I’d invited to come with me) — it was mostly folks who managed marketing for large companies, people who wouldn’t have much involvement with SEO anyway.

Vanessa hung out in the corner, largely unmolested, during the cocktail hour before she spoke. It was like the people in attendance had no idea the quality of the resource they had right there in the room. It was like an opportunity to ask Google all your questions about Google. If it had been people from the tech startup crowd, you wouldn’t have even been able to see her, let alone talk to her. But the Seattle Direct Marketing Association, ironically, probably didn’t market this event as well as they could have.

Or perhaps they purposely didn’t promote the event to the tech crowd so that “normal” marketing people could have the chance to hear her speak without crazy techies getting in the way. I dunno. Either way, I was totally awed by her. She’s just so … cool. She was dressed casually, and she spoke like a normal person, not like some wannabe genius who’s trying to impress you with all the big words she knows and all the important things she’s done. That’s what I was expecting — a haughty, annoying princess who somehow self-promoted her way into this lucrative career.

That’s not at all what I got. Underneath the totally normal exterior, you can sense immediately that she is a genius. She has an ability to rapidly distill the key points from broad, complex issues, which is what I tend to use as a barometer for someone’s raw intelligence. Everything else you can teach. She was kind and open and friendly. She was no self-promoter; she was the real deal. I’m rarely impressed by anyone, but I was impressed by her. And I rarely say this about anyone, let alone a chick, but she’s smarter than I am.

I got to ask her a bunch of questions during the Q&A because no one else had any damn questions for her (seriously in a tech crowd they would never have gotten to even one of my questions) and then afterward I was able to talk to her one-on-one (and I didn’t have to fight the swarm of people that would have been after her had this been a tech event).

It was so awesome and helpful and eye-opening, and really just so exciting because it’s so rare that I see women as role models. There are just so few women out there that I can look at and think, “I want to be like her. I want everything she has.”

I remember, years ago, sneaking my way into the front row to hear Carly Fiorina speak on a panel at the California Women’s Conference. Afterward, I called my mom, practically in tears, like, “She’s AMAZING! I want to be JUST LIKE HER.” I’d never seen, in person, a woman I looked up to like that before. (In reality, Carly and I disagree strongly on some political issues, but there are no words to express how fucking polished this woman was, how obviously brilliant and demanding of respect.) I felt the same way about Dodgers CEO Jamie McCourt when I took her class at UCLA. And Vanessa kind of did the same thing for me. I feel like guys have a million role models, like the world is crawling with brilliant, successful men on the speaker circuit, but it’s much harder as a woman to find another woman whose career path you can admire and dissect, especially for someone like me, whose career aspirations have always fallen in largely male-dominated industries. It’s always such a big deal for me when I do find one.

Anyway, Vanessa has a new book out called Marketing in the Age of Google. It’s useful for anyone in SEO, but it’s targeted mostly to the average business owner who wants to leverage the power of search engines to promote and grow their business. You should buy it.

And for the record, yes, I’m beyond grateful to the people who fought and died so that I could post whatever the fuck I want to post on the Internet, especially as relates to Memorial Day. I’m also grateful to the young men and women who put their lives on the line every day so that I can have — er — oil, is it? Is it oil still?

Because we’ve got satellites that can catch you reading in the park and read right along with you and we’ve got these computers that can process terabytes of data in fractions of a second, and we have these governments with better cash flow than God and somehow we are still resolving arguments by sending teenagers with guns away from their families and to kill people and be killed.

If these governments were run by women, these kids would never be out there killing each other. It is 2010 and we are still resolving political conflict by murdering our teenagers. Read that again and let it sink in. If you can’t have a happy Memorial Day, at least have a goddamn angry one. You should be angry that we continue to crank out 18-year-old kids that will soon need to be memorialized because we can’t resolve our conflict using the tools we taught those kids, a decade ago, in school.

So, ya know, I’m not going to spend the day somber. I’m going to catch some rays and play with my dog and barbeque and hope that, at some point, we’ll have to provide these soldiers a career alternative because we’re going to sort these messes out by using our words and sharing.

So, like, VICTORY!!!

Right?

[source]

“What is the lubrication level of Samantha Jones’s 52-year-old vagina? Has the change of life dulled its sparkle? Do its aged and withered depths finally chafe from the endless pounding, pounding, pounding—cruel phallic penance demanded by the emotionally barren sexual compulsive from which it hangs?”

I haven’t even seen the movie yet, but someone really oughtta option this review.