Bill Cammack

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Bill Cammack — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:56:34 +0000

Bill Cammack picks up his copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on November 05, 2009 in NYC, 5 days before the official release date of 11.10.09.

How To Make A Blog Post

Bill Cammack — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:37:39 +0000

* Click the HD button for a clearer version. Click the fullscreen button to watch full-screen! :D *

Bill Cammack explains how to make a blog post using WordPress (or pretty much any other platform).

Topics include hypertext / hyperlinking, images, media & style.

Recorded as part of New in November 2009 (newinnov.tumblr.com)

Running Dogs

Bill Cammack — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 12:16:59 +0000

My homegirl Gaby, whom I’ve known for years, remarked one day about my photo sets that she was glad to finally have seen the same girl twice in my pictures, hahaha :D

Until she said that, I really hadn’t thought about it. My life is basically spur of the moment. I never have the same day twice in a row unless I’m working for the same client two days in a row, which STILL isn’t the same day, because the video is closer to completion and in a different state today than it was yesterday. To me, it counts as the same day, because I know where I’m going and what I’m going to do before I wake up that day. Yuck. :/

Similarly, I don’t know what chick(s) I want to spend time with until I feel like spending time with them. It’s a craving, like how pregnant chicks want pickles in their ice cream. :D (Is that actually true? I think I saw that on The Flintstones one time? haha). This causes scheduling conflicts because I can’t make plans a week in advance to spend time with a gal because I don’t know if I’m going to crave her when that particular day comes around. If I’m not feelin’ her that day and I spend time with her anyway, I can’t bring my A-game to the table and honestly don’t even really care about spending time with her.

Another issue is that the only women you’re going to see me in pictures with are the ones that are involved with Social Media. It’s one thing to spend time together and a completely different thing to broadcast to the world that you’re spending time with someone. There are business-based reasons to not broadcast one’s social life and personal and social reasons to not broadcast one’s social life. Time that I spend with someone isn’t just MY business, it’s HER business as well, so even if I’d personally like to broadcast “HEY! Check me out with this chick! :D”, I’m not authorized to or interested in putting her business in the streets, so I don’t.

Too Many Women

This is New York City. You basically never see the same chick twice, unless y’all have similar travel patterns or you happen to live on the same block or work in the same building. If you live here, try it out for yourself. All this week, when you get on the train at the same time to arrive at your job at the same time every single day, look around the subway car and make a mental note of the women in the car. You can even get in the exact same CAR if you like! :D Make the same notes for the next four days of the week and you’ll notice that it’s never the same gals. Never.

Live like this long enough, and you’ll develop a “There are always more chicks just like this one” mentality. I’m not saying that’s a good thing. I’m saying that it flavors your vision and perception. Lots of guys focus the hell out of pulling ONE chick or impressing ONE chick when it’s much easier here to meet a different chick with the exact same look as the one you’re trying to impress, except she likes you more than the original one did.

My friend Corinne hilariously labeled me as “not really that selective” (hahahaha Which I’m *STILL* getting laughs off of to this day, like a full month later!), but it’s not an issue of not being selective. It’s an issue of finding the EXACT. SAME. QUALITIES in myriad females so selecting between them is just as impossible as selecting which bottle of Evian water tastes better than another bottle of Evian water. You might be able to differentiate between Poland Spring and Evian and you might even have a preference, like you’ll always select Poland Spring if you have a choice, but, sorry. Water is Water. They didn’t put different water into the different Evian bottles. They put a percentage of the exact. same. water. into each bottle.

The only actual difference between equally attractive women is their personalities.

Sometimes you want to hang out with the down-to-earth asexual chick that you know you’re going to have a pleasant evening and excellent conversations with. Sometimes you want to hang out with the alcoholic sex-addict who couldn’t come up with an interesting topic of conversation to save her life. Sometimes, you want to hang out with the world-traveler with the fantastic accent so you can listen to stories about places you never intend to visit in your entire life. Sometimes, you want to hang out with the lesbian that’s going to chase chicks harder than you do while you’re out at the bar. Sometimes you want to hang out with the artsy chick whose views are diametrically opposed to yours, but you really enjoy fighting with her and only love and cherish her MORE after your battles.

Living in a city with literally millions of women, not counting tourists that visit here every single day (and you KNOW how chicks DO when they’re on VACATION!!! ;) hehe) reduces your tolerance for corny behavior to ZERO. Hold the door for a chick and she doesn’t say “Thank You”?.. Instant write-off. She’s a Cro-Mag. Can’t be bothered. Always flakes out on hangouts? Write-off. Never there for you when you have a bad day? Write-off. Likes to use you for Social Media contacts? Write-off.

You don’t have this luxury in the sticks, because there are only a few women to choose from, so you have to basically select the lesser of the evils. You have to select the most attractive chick with the least amount of traits that you absolutely, completely detest and then live with those traits and hope beyond hope that she doesn’t pass those off to your kids with her… HOPEFULLY *YOUR* kids! HAHAHA :D

Running Dogs

This is why I liken myself and the few like me to Running Dogs. If you happen to be there when we mosse through, you’ll probably get to enjoy the show.. We’re not stopping, though. You couldn’t stop us if you tried. Attempting to do so is dangerous.. for YOU.. emotionally… We’re on an entirely different level. We’re seeing what you’re not seeing and reacting to what you don’t even realize is reality. We’re always on our way through to somewhere else and something else to do, see and be a part of. If there’s something extraordinary about you, you’ll probably get an invite to roll with, or at least meet up with us somewhere in the future along our random travels.

It’s an addiction.. An addiction to desire fulfillment. It’s the same thing that drove Genghis Khan to keep conquering lands after he was already well accomplished, feared and respected. It’s the same thing that drives businesspeople to keep working and creating companies after they’ve already amassed more wealth than they’re ever going to spend in their entire lifetimes. It’s the rush. It’s the thrill of the hunt. It’s being in play, in the game. Striving for what you want right now is better than settling for what you were offered yesterday. Most of the time, you end up empty-handed. Some of the time, you come off with STELLAR days and evenings that make it all worthwhile and gear you up for the next quest/conquest.

This lifestyle isn’t for everyone. I hope I never forget a conversation I had with a friend of mine outside a local bar, where he told me (pardon my French, ladies) “I’m tired of hoes”. When he said it, I laughed my ass off until I realized that he was completely serious. The Game ceases to be fun if you lose the ability to appreciate women throwing sex at you because you look good and/or you have money and/or you’re popular. Sometimes, a guy wants to actually build something with a gal or start a family. You can’t do that with groupies. They’re just as much on the hunt as you are. They’re in it for the thrill of being with you like you’re in it for the thrill of being with them. No more, no less. They don’t care about you any more than you care about them. You can’t trust them any more than they can trust you.

It’s an environment conducive to producing alliances between rogue freelancers. You’re like a bunch of mercenaries that are all drinking and eating together because you’ve all been paid for by the king’s gold to work together towards a common goal. You don’t have to like each other or respect each other. You just have to do your part, have your fun and collect your payment at the end… Assuming you’re still alive. :D

Don’t Try This At Home

This is why you probably can’t actually use ANY of my dating advice haha, there isn’t much likelihood that you and I are playing the same game.

I can do and say anything I want, because there are always more chicks. You have to be afraid of losing the one chick you have that you worked so hard to get and that you feel would be incredibly difficult if not impossible to replace.

Also, maybe you already found that one chick that floats your boat entirely, in which case, I’m very happy for you and more power TO y’all! :D It’s an incredibly excellent feeling to be a part of a greatly cohesive unit. It’s a great feeling to want to hang out with the same chick every single day. I’m not knocking that lifestyle, just trying to explain mine.

I live daily on borrowed time.. Not borrowed from myself, but borrowed from other people. I’m that guy in between relationships. I’m that vacation from their daily lives. Nobody LIVES at Disney World, you’ll notice. They get their kicks and go away. Mickey Mouse doesn’t hang out with the same people every day and neither do I.

Like I said, it’s not for the faint of heart. Some people crave stability. Some people crave reliability and reliable redundancy. Some people just don’t have the energy to hit the streets and see what they can do tonight. Some people don’t have the insane amounts of turnover that we have here in Manhattan, NYC, USA where we can go to three different bars within 200 feet of each other, meet 20 people we’ve never seen before in our lives and then do the same thing again tomorrow night.

Is it emotionally healthy? Probably not. We get what we get when and where we get it. Better that than being bored to death or spending time with someone when we really aren’t feelin’ them. I can’t possibly count how many gals I should probably have married that I let slide so they could go do that stuff with someone who actually cares… or who’s willing to pretend that they care. Fortunately for me, I almost never feel lonely, yet I’m constantly battling boredom. I’d rather be in the game.. In the hunt.. Running…

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

Unattractive Women’s Relationship Advantages

Bill Cammack — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 12:21:41 +0000

So.. Like, every day, guys have to hear stuff like “I’m not a piece of meat” and “I want him to like me for me”, which doesn’t make any sense, because a woman’s looks are a PART of her “me”, so if a guy likes you for your looks or your body, stop trying to dismiss that like it doesn’t count for anything.

Having said that.. If a guy DOESN’T think you’re cute and/or your body ISN’T sexually inspirational to him and he dates you anyway, you might just have a long-term boyfriend on your hands…

Long Term Relationships

Attractive women are at a SEVERE DISADVANTAGE when it comes to LTRs, because they’re not going to look like that forever. ‘Matter of fact, I’ve met gals that looked completely different six months after I met them, so women that get the rap based on how they currently look have a tough row to hoe. If they cease to maintain their looks, dude might be outtahere like Belvedere.

That’s why I find these television shows really funny where chicks run around giving themselves props for their looks. Good Luck with that. :) It’s these same chicks that roam the subway stations looking like confused zombies once their looks are gone and they become has-beens and actually have to depend on their underdeveloped personalities to make friends and influence people.

Personality Development

Unattractive women have it way better. :) Their personalities are way more developed because guys don’t approach them for sex so the conversations are completely different. Guys make plans to get together with unattractive gals to watch the Yankee game and actually WATCH the Yankee game! :D It wasn’t just a ploy to get her alone so they could hit it.

If a guy ends up attracted to her, it’s for traits that are way less fleeting than looks. She’s likely to be just as cool as she is today next year. She’s likely to be just as intelligent and witty next year. She’s likely to be just as caring and attentive as she is right now for years to come. Meanwhile.. Women who got the rap for their looks are in peril of losing their man to the next better-looking female that comes along. Guys that date for looks are notorious for trading chicks in for the newer, hawter model like happens with cars.

Ease Of Maintenance

Another benefit to unattractive women is that nobody else is trying to kick it to them. :) You don’t have to work so hard to maintain your relationship with her because there aren’t guys lined up around the block trying to steal your girl.

I remember one time, this friend of mine started dating this girl and we all laughed our asses off about it because she was clearly busted, except the problem was that we hadn’t realized that she always dresses down. Months later, we saw her actual body and we were like “HOLY ****!!! :O”. We were like NO WONDER he had hooked up with her and he was suddenly heralded as a gold miner instead of a fool with zero taste in women. The point is that my friend was living on Easy Street because HE knew what was under the hood and nobody else did.

Trickle-Down Theory

Unattractive women don’t have to work as hard to meet men. This is because attractive women will bring them out partying so they can perform the duties of the DUFF, which is similar to a wingman, but not really. The DUFF’s job is to step in and cockblock when she sees that a guy’s trying to lay the attractive chick. The second part of the DUFF’s job is to make the attractive chick look even hotter, merely by standing next to her.

The DUFF’s payoff for performing her duties is that she gets all of the trickle-down.. The guys that didn’t get the rap to the attractive chick and are willing to settle for less or attempt to back-door the situation by making friends with the DUFF, getting her number and getting invited out for another shot at the attractive chick in the near future. Basically, by being “The Woman Next To THE WOMAN”, the unattractive woman gains access to hundreds of guys that would never have spoken to her at all, had she gone to that same bar by herself.

An added benefit to the trickle-down is that in most cases, the DUFF actually has a STELLAR personality compared to the attractive chick. Hawt chicks get hit on all day, every day and it gets on their nerves and causes them to react in a “Let Them Eat Cake!” fashion when a guy steps to them and tells them how beautiful they are for the 20th time since they walked into the club. A lot of guys are tired as hell of this and when they accidentally get deflected to the DUFF, they realize that she’s actually much cooler, smarter and much better company than the chick they meant to kick it to. This is why a lot of insanely attractive women are dumbfounded about how come they don’t get as many relationship offers as women who clearly rolled out of bed just before coming to the party.

Random Advantages

If she’s so inclined, it’s easier for unattractive women to cheat. This is because nobody would believe that someone actually hit it other than the dude that was “desperate enough” to date her in the first place. When she claims she was at home eating Häagen-Dazs, no questions are asked, even though she had actually been at the club all night shaking her ass, making out and getting numbers.

Unattractive women are also more likely to give unattractive guys a chance to date them. This means that they’re selecting from a much larger pool of men and are way more likely to hook up with someone that is actually SINCERE about wanting her to be his boyfriend. Attractive women are busy being selective and trying to date the most attractive, richest, most popular guys… which means they’re way more likely to get used and dumped, because there’s no reason that guys like that should settle for one chick. All guys SOUND sincere when we’re trying to get laid. It’s just not true, though. Unattractive guys can promise the moon and the stars to attractive gals and get no dap. No light. Nada. After enough crashing & burning, guys start to want something real and lower their visual standards while raising their personality standards. This is where unattractive chicks clean up. :D

Unattractive women look the same in the morning………

I wouldn’t be surprised if unattractive chicks have more kids on average, being that their boyfriends/husbands aren’t worried about potentially messing up her stellar physique. Dunno. \o/

Anyway… You can see the myriad advantages that unattractive women have when it comes to relationships. Attractive women can get INTO relationships easier, but unattractive women can REMAIN in relationships easier because they were probably selected for qualities that are going to LAST throughout the years. Keep that in mind next time you see a DUFF chillin’ at the bar, smiling because she’s consistently looking like a HERO for being cool, funny, interesting & caring towards dudes that her attractive homegirl just finished haughtily rejecting.

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

Requests For Action / Fishing For Compliments

Bill Cammack — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:39:47 +0000

Requests For Action

I’m not sure what I think about Requests For Action (RFA)… What I mean by that is that for instance, I’m about to take part for the second year in a row in a videoblogging series that a few of my friends and I do called “New in November” (newinnov.tumblr.com).

Personally, what I would do regarding the site/series is INFORM people that it’s going on or that it’s available. What I would NOT do is request for them to do something about it, such as follow it, reblog it, RT it and DEFINITELY NOT “Please rate my video 5 stars!” :/

To me, that defeats the purpose of the viewer watching your material and deciding that your video actually DESERVED 5 stars and clicking on the meter to indicate that. If you tell people what to do, many times, they’ll do it because you asked them to, not because they give a damn or actually think your show, product or service is any good. Also, lots of times, it’s not even because you asked them to, but rather because they don’t want to be perceived as “not down with the program”. It’s like how I originally dealt with Twitter, following back everyone that followed me… out of “courtesy”. That’s something I picked up from friends of mine who were on Twitter for a full year before I found out about it two years ago. That didn’t work for me, so I don’t do that anymore. I follow whom I follow and whomever follows me follows me. Period.

OTOH..… There’s a very good reason to tell people what to do about your media. A lot of people aren’t aware that they can do things like click “like” on a Facebook post or leave a comment at the bottom of a blog post. A lot of people aren’t aware that they can rate YouTube videos or click the heart on Vimeo videos. It makes sense that you want to inform the uninformed about what they can do. I use a plugin for my site called “What Would Seth Godin Do?” which places a note at the top of my posts for the first five times someone comes to my site that says something like “You might want to subscribe blah blah blah” for that very reason. People come to my site and have no idea they can subscribe and get my posts in their email boxes or get my posts via RSS instead of having to check my site to see if I posted something new.

I also have “Share” links on my posts. That’s an opportunity, not a request. That saves people from having to go to actual websites like stumbleupon to add a post of mine. They can do it right from that link. I could also put “HEY! MAKE SURE YOU SHARE THIS WITH YOUR FRIENDS SO I CAN HAVE MORE TRAFFIC TO MY SITE!!! :D” on every single post, which I think would be incredibly obnoxious as well as ineffective.

Fishing For Compliments

I have the same issue with RFAs that I have with people that fish for compliments. When you fish for compliments, you look corny and desperate. People are more likely to tell you what you want to hear out of PITY than actually honestly feeling whatever they say. Also, people feel put on the spot when you fish for compliments. If you don’t deserve the compliment, you’ve put them between a rock and a hard place.

Do you look fat in that dress? HELLS YEAH YOU LOOK FAT IN THAT DRESS! but who’s actually going to say that? “Nooo… Nooo… Not at all. You look great. Have you been working out? :D”.. You’re forcing people to be fake with you by requesting that they tell you something that they weren’t offering. Maybe you’re going to look fat regardless of what you wear, and the dress isn’t actually the issue. Maybe you also look GOOD to the person you’re asking, regardless of whether you’re slim and trim or not. Did you think about THAT?…

Having said that, I’m the type of person that doesn’t naturally say what I’m thinking. The question “How do you like my outfit?” may very well elicit a flood of natural comments an compliments that I was THINKING but not SAYING. However, that’s an open-ended question.. “How do you like X?” or even “DO you like X?”. It offers the listener the opportunity to give an honest opinion or no opinion at all. “This jacket looks Funky-Fresh, RIGHT???” puts the other person on the spot if they had just been thinking about how WACK your jacket looks and that they’re embarrassed to be seen with you right now.

Open-Ended References

So I guess I’m a fan of open-ended references. “Here’s this thing that’s going on” or “Here’s this new video or post I created” as opposed to “Go to my video, scroll down the page and click the meter to rate my video 5 stars”. For that, people may as well not watch your video at all, since all you want is the rating so your video can LOOK popular and appreciated when in reality it’s a bunch of your friends clicking 5-stars because you asked them to.

There are no ethics to this game, so I’m not suggesting what people should or shouldn’t do. If that’s how you get your props, by telling people what you want them to do and hoping they do it, good for you. How’s that workin’ for ya? ;) I personally wouldn’t be satisfied with telling people how I want them to react to my media. You lose the ability to separate the real compliments from what’s written by people that are simply following orders. If you can’t tell when someone honestly enjoys and appreciates your media, what do you actually have?…..

Then again, I do Social Media for fun. I enjoy expressing myself. I realize that other people are attempting to build businesses with this stuff and it’s important for them to appear to be popular and for their media to appear well-received, often-watched and usually rated “5 stars” in order to try to get a sponsorship or some kind of revenue-sharing deal or put affiliate links all over their sites or Google Ads or whatever they’re trying to do. Social Media for them is a means to an end instead of just being THE END. This is it. This is the expression. Tell me what you think about it VS Tell other people that you agree that my video is excellent. RATE THIS! vs RATE THIS 5 STARS! or maybe just Rate it if you feel like it…

I like pitches that offer the viewer/listener some kind of “value added” if they click on a link, such as “Click Here to learn how to make a Masquerade Mask! :D”

That kind of pitch tells people WHAT THEY’RE GOING TO RECEIVE if they click on the link. That’s different from telling them WHAT THEY CAN DO FOR YOU by clicking the same link. In the video, Corinne says “make sure to show us some love by subscribing”. That makes perfect sense. If you love the show, SUBSCRIBE, so you get automatic updates. Also, their show, TheadBanger is a business, so their goal is to amass viewers and create, sustain and grow a community. I’m sure a lot of their clips get passed around in emails, etc so it’s likely that there are a lot of people that see it that wouldn’t be aware that it’s an ongoing series as opposed to a one-off, so it’s a good idea to make people aware that they CAN subscribe if they want to.

Still.. The draw is the content, the hosts and their generous utilization of UGC (User-Generated Content). Their fans can actually be ON the show with them if they send in videos/pictures of their personally-created fashion items. It’s like “Here’s more of what you enjoyed in the past” as opposed to “Here’s another opportunity for you to do me a favor and click on my ratings bar”. It’s still too early in the game to figure out whether directly telling people what to do is effective at all. It’s also too early to tell whether people’s personal reputations are being sullied by their constant shilling for whatever company they work for. Maybe none of this matters at all and I’m oversensitive to the issue because I know so many people that create media and I watch so much media online every day. \o/

The way I see it, RFAs and fishing for compliments are both signs of desperation and they’re not pretty. :) If people think your video’s worth 5 stars, they’ll rate it. If people want to say something, they’ll comment. If people want to share your posts with their friends, they will. Make it as easy for them to do that if they feel like it and even though your community will be smaller, it’ll be much more passionate, dedicated and interested in what you have to say.

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

Authenticity: The Matrix

Bill Cammack — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:04:23 +0000

* I started this on October 21st, my birthday, but I had so many Happy Birthday messages to reply to (Thank You, Everyone! :D) that I didn’t get back to this post until today. *

Liz Burr & Bill Cammack

New Year’s Day

I’m sitting here answering all of my birthday messages on Facebook. I appreciate them all and I personally feel that if someone took the time to comment on my Facebook page or on BillCammack.com or on my Twitter page, it’s the VERY. LEAST. I. CAN. DO. to reply to them directly and as swiftly as possible. I’m not a fan of people’s styles who post something and then have ZERO presence in their comments. That says to me that you’re talking AT people instead of talking WITH people. I’m not a fan of that.

This is going to be a calm year for me. I can tell already. My life goes in cycles… one year HECTIC!!! and the next year calm. I feel very “smoothed out” this morning and I’m thinking about the concept of “giving”. The birthday gift the cosmos have handed me this morning is a really good grasp on what I think about people giving things, even free things like blog comments or birthday wishes or even holding the door open for someone to walk through. I have a matrix I’d like to share with you, based on that enlightenment.

The Matrix

The elements of the matrix are:

What you have
Whether you WANT TO give it to me or not
Whether you ACTUALLY give it to me or not

Each one of these elements is separately important. I know a lot of people, so I’ve been able to experience how all the different permutations feel, IRL. The end result is either FAKE or REAL. A lot of people think that so long as they end up conveying nice sentiments, that’s the best thing they could do for someone. I think that’s absolutely wrong. I think the best thing you can do is be REAL with people. That’s obviously easier said than done, but that’s what I’m going to strive for this year. In my calmness, I’m going to strive for REALITY and the chips will fall.

Here’s how the matrix works:

If you have something for me and you want to give it to me and you give it to me, that’s REAL.
If you have something for me and you want to give it to me and you don’t give it to me, that’s FAKE.
If you have something for me and you don’t want to give it to me and you give it to me, that’s FAKE.
If you have something for me and you don’t want to give it to me and you don’t give it to me, that’s REAL.
If you don’t have something for me and you want to pretend like you do, so you give it to me, that’s FAKE.
If you don’t have something for me and you want to pretend as if, but you don’t give it to me, that’s REAL.
If you don’t have something for me and you don’t want to pretend, but you give it to me anyway, that’s FAKE.
If you don’t have something for me and you don’t want to pretend and you don’t give it to me, that’s REAL.

Does that make sense? :)

Find The Real

You’ll notice that regardless of where you start or how you travel, there are only two potential outcomes… REAL and FAKE. Real, you can build on. Fake, you cannot. I mean, you can build on it, but you’re building your house on quicksand. In the long run, it’s worthless. Real is worthwhile, whether you like or dislike the person’s actual way of being towards you.

Let’s use the example of greetings.. Like when you see someone somewhere for the first time and have a natural reaction.

I showed up to a bar a couple of weeks ago with a friend of mine that I had been pre-gaming with, and the second I walked in, I found myself standing next to a booth where an acquaintance of mine was sitting who’s also an actor. He was sitting with several attractive females and was probably the King of the Hill in his area. When we saw each other, he got up and we greeted each other genuinely. That’s REAL. I appreciate that. There are lots of other people who in that same situation wouldn’t have wanted to give up their props and would have lamped in their seats like “Let the peons come to me!”. If that’s how you really feel and that’s how you carry yourself, that’s good. That’s real too. That lets me know what you think about yourself and what you think about me. Thank you for that information. I’ll utilize it in the future.

There are lots of different customs for greeting women as well. Depending on your culture, it might be a hug, it might be a kiss on the cheek or it might be both. It might be neither. It might be a handshake. It might be a wave from a distance with no physical contact whatsoever… Whatever it is, there are subtle differences between how a gal greets you that indicate how she’s feeling NOW relative to how she usually feels about you. You can tell a chick has a new relationship going when you suddenly get one of those “I’m still attracted to you, but I have a boyfriend now and I can’t afford for him to think The Kid’s tappin’ this” hugs. It’s no big deal.. She’ll come back online as soon as they break up and it’ll actually be better since she’ll be looking to reassure herself that she’s sexy & desirable = .. REBOUND!!!!! :D

Don’t Got It

Another form of fakeness is when people don’t feel friendly towards you but they’re scared to death of being talked about on the back-channel as a HATER, so they act friendly merely so they can stay out of the tabloids. There are two problems with this. #1 is that it doesn’t feel right. The smiles are fake. The greetings are fake. The conversation tidbits are fake. It’s obvious. #2 is that when someone has literally hundreds of acquaintances in the same town, the number of people you can spill the beans to without it getting back around to the person you’re talking about is incredibly small.

I’ve had the unique privilege of standing face-to-face with people that I know have talked about me behind my back. It’s an interesting experience, because you’re standing there wondering if they’re going to bring up the issue that they talked about so freely when they thought you would never find out about it.

To be fair, IRL is “the same, but different” when it comes to meeting me. Since you don’t know ANYONE like me, when you read what I write without having spent time with me, you formulate your opinions based on examples that YOU have from your past of people that said the same things or expressed the same sentiments. I say the exact same things IRL that I say online.. actually, I say MORE IRL than I say online because I make blog posts for general consumption and I really get down to the nitty-gritty with my close friends, usually over a long night of brewskis! :D

The difference, however, is that you get way more cues from me IRL, including vocal tone, eye contact or avoidance, physical contact, laughter (similar senses of humor), appreciation, acknowledgement, recognition, empathy… Lots of stuff that you wouldn’t expect to get from reading my blog posts. There’s a very good reason why I have over 700 female Facebook friends. Feel free to ask the couple hundred that have actually hung out with The Kid in person whether they had a good time or not. ;)

Sharing vs. Bragging

Having read what I just wrote, to a lot of people, that last paragraph is going to sound like braggadocio. It’s actually not. It’s just the truth. If I didn’t have over 700 female facebook friends (out of 1,690 total), I wouldn’t say so. If I hadn’t been in the top 20 Google results for the word/name “Bill” for almost the last two years, I wouldn’t say so. If I wasn’t in a YouTube video that’s approaching 2 million views, I wouldn’t say so. These are all checkable facts. I’m not saying “ha ha. Look at me, compared to you!”. This is my life, so this is what I have to talk about.

For instance, I don’t have any kids. Other people have kids and talk about them all the time. I don’t accuse these people of bragging that their reproductive systems work. (I wouldn’t know whether mine does or doesn’t, being that I’m a condom HERO) I don’t hate on people for talking about their successful startups or their real estate coups. It just so happens that most of what I do is HAVE. A. GOOD. TIME. because that’s what I want from my life. It just so happens that I’m not interested in only one female. It just so happens that I live in the center of the known universe, New York City. It just so happens that I’m a rather accomplished freelance video editor, so if you google Video Editor Resume, you get ME.

I talk about myself because that’s what I have to share. I don’t have anything else. :) No startup, no kids, no job, nothing! :D Just because the stuff I talk about is FUN!!! doesn’t make it any different from what those people share on their blogs.

Authenticity

So, this year (my year starts on my birthday), I’m going to strive for realness in giving & communication. I’m not sure how successful I’ll be, but I’m going to try. It’s a lot easier for me to say things that I don’t care about than it is to say things I DO care about. All I know is that the people who like who I am (or at least tolerate it, huh) have stuck around throughout the years and they’re greatly appreciated. The people who liked who they thought I was and then found out they were wrong have disappeared, which is also fantastic.

I decided to be authentic with one of my homegirl’s homegirls a couple of years back. It was late at night and I was bored with the chick, so I decided to inform her that although I liked and respected her as a person, her opinion of me didn’t matter to me one single iota because I was never going to see her again after that day. Of course, the gal took incredible offense at this, but I was speaking from an heavily favored probability. I had never seen her before that night. The only reason I was even hanging out with her was that my homegirl brought her out with us. She had already informed me she wasn’t interested in me, physically. There was no reason why I would ever contact her and there was no reason why she would ever contact me. As far as I was concerned, I was having a conversation with a ghost.. you know, like on the Sixth Sense tip. We were going to spend our hours together that evening and then she was going to cease to exist, entirely.

Of course she argued against this for her own self-esteem reasons. She tried to convince me that her opinion mattered to me, which was and IS entirely impossible. After she stormed out of the bar with her lackey / fanboi / human pet in tow, my homegirl and I had another hour’s worth of laughs at her expense because of how riled up she got over nothing. Just like I figured on that day and told her to her face, I’ve never, EVER come into contact with that girl EVER AGAIN in the couple of years since that conversation. Just like I said, she ceased to exist after she walked out of that bar. I still like her as a person and appreciate the fantastic conversation we were having, but I couldn’t possibly care ANY LESS about what a ghost thinks about me.

This is the ‘problem’ with authenticity and this is the path I’m taking this year. When your philosophy clashes with someone else’s, that person often chooses to bail rather than consider your point of view. I’m like that with horror movies. I don’t watch them because I don’t care. A lot of people get kicks from watching people run around in an abandoned hotel getting killed off one at a time. *YAWN*. No thanks. I’ll pass.

The way I feel right now, I’d rather have fewer acquaintances that are all down with the program than more acquaintances that follow/friend me because I haven’t said anything they don’t like yet. Spare Me. :/

Living in the limelight
The universal dream
For those who wish to seem

Those who wish to be
Must put aside the alienation
Get on with the fascination
The real relation
The underlying theme

~ Rush “Limelight”

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

Video Games & Dating, Part 01

Bill Cammack — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:54:33 +0000

Ladies… If you really want to learn about your man’s personality, hang around him when he’s playing video games.

All of y’all that are dating gamers know I’m telling the truth.

The way he plays his games is the exact same way he’s going to interact with YOU….. um… assuming that he cares as much about YOU as he does his VIDEO GAMES….. which isn’t likely.

What game are we playing, anyway?

I don’t know much about dudes that play Mario Bash Bash or Dance Dance Revolution or whatever cutesy, corny games they make these days. I know about FPS. First Person Shooters. War Simulations. They’re still called “games” because Atari was a game. You had a little cutesy tank and would shoot a little square at the other cutesy tank and try to hit it more times than it hit you.

Technology has improved to the point that these so-called “games” are now being utilized as preparations for actual war.

I found this out from watching my friend Baratunde Thurston’s show Popular Science’s “Future Of…”.

One of the episodes is about the future of Combat, and it’s rather enlightening…

Popular Science: The Future of the Military — Perhaps

Drones have become common battlefield tools in the past decade but are typically controlled at the company or battalion level, which respectively have about 135 and 650 soldiers apiece. FCS wants tools like the UAV at the platoon (approximately 40 soldiers) and even squad (10 members) level. The vision is also to expand the range of applications. The Massachusetts-based company iRobot manufactures a PackBot currently deployed overseas, which the military uses primarily to scout for improvised explosive devices, while the SUGV, also made by iRobot, may one day lead infantry assaults like the one I witnessed. A single soldier can comfortably tote a SUGV, and the controller, copied almost directly from that of an Xbox game console, was designed to be intuitively easy for a young recruit to use.

Look Familiar?: The controls for FCS unmanned
vehicles are modeled after those used for video
game consoles
Photo Credit: Brent Humphreys

One of the soldiers handed me the controller; I donned the head-up display and started driving. The robot crashed into a wall. After practicing for a few minutes, I was able to steer into one of the buildings and scan for insurgents. There was something exciting — and faintly disturbing — about the notion that I could help battle insurgents with technology that felt only slightly elevated from the R/C cars of my childhood. But I wasn’t totally sold. Removing the display, I asked what would prevent an enemy from shooting the SUGV as soon as he spotted it. “Nothing,” replied one of the soldiers nearby, Lt.-Col. Ed House. “But if he does, we know he’s there, so the SUGV has accomplished its mission. Better to shoot a robot than a soldier.”

So.. Laugh all you want while people call our war simulations “games”, but that’s not what’s actually going on.

Dominance

One of the things that a lot of women can’t grasp is why guys do the confrontational things we do. We fight. We go to war. We remain in the rat race when we’re already rich and have more money than we’re ever going to spend during whatever’s left of our lives…..

This is because we’re built to prove that we’re better than the next man.

This is why we cheer for our home team.

New York is better than Philadelphia on this day in Football. Montreal is better than California on this day in Baseball. Our country beat the living **** out of your country in a war, so we get to tell you what to do and/or steal all of your oil.

This is our lives. This is what matters. This is what moves us. This is what we’re passionate about.

THIS is what’s going on when we’re online playing video “games”. YOU stepped to ME on an equal battlefield where you had the same opportunity to select guns and power-ups as I did and I *WAXED* you!… SIT. THE. ****. DOWN! :D That’s what it’s all about. Proving minute after minute that you’re better than someone else. If you don’t understand how good that feels, you’ll never understand hardcore gamers.

I’ve personally (thanks to my teammates and other people I’ve made alliances with via gaming) been #1 in the world in a game that took two months to play. When the smoke cleared and the dust settled, I was BY FAR the #1 base capturer, planet-wide. There were players from the USA, Japan, England, France and a few other scattered countries that were represented in the game. Also, the guy I left in the dust at #2, I happen to know he was cheating, because I know him and played with AND against him.

That’s the flag I planted. I planted it for myself. I planted it for my team. I planted it for my country. It’s in the books. It’s a done deal. You can NOT take that away from me, EV*A*R. This is what we do. We represent ourselves. We represent our friends. People talk about us in languages we don’t even understand, because they respect our skills and the dignity with which we carry ourselves whether we win or lose. If you’ve never felt this, I can’t explain to you how important it is or how good it feels. If you’ve never gone into matches where people wrote you off because they’ve never heard of you and then you defeat a team that everyone agrees is one of the tightest squads playing the game today and then people STILL don’t want to give you your propers.. I can’t explain how that feels to you. If you’ve never beaten up A SECOND HERALDED TEAM in the same tournament and the peons don’t want to give you your props, but both of the teams you beat have respect for you (and you for them) that’s lasted to this very day… I can’t explain to you how that feels. :)

Dating

What does this have to do with dating? :D Well… Before that day we got drunk and went out to the club and you were looking good and we decided to kick it to you because you were HAWT and turning us on… We were gaming with our homeboys.

Before you got added to the roster, we already had a bunch of IRL friends and online friends. You’re going to have to make your way up the ladder. You don’t get instant props because you’re the “girlfriend”. Going to your moms’s house for Sunday dinner isn’t high up on our list of things to do.

Sitting around on a bench with the other henpecked boyfriends at the mall while you shop for duplicate pairs of black shoes that you don’t even need to waste your money on isn’t high up on our list of things to do. That chick-flick you rented on DVD might never see the inside of our XBOX or Playstation3, ya dig? :D

At the same time that you’re at a decided disadvantage if you date a gamer, you also have an unique opportunity to be around him when he’s being REAL. You’d be surprised that some of the most calm, intelligent, cerebral dudes will be screaming and cursing at the top of their lungs when people mess up and do the wrong thing or the game jerks them. huh Some friends of mine didn’t know who I am and challenged me to one-on-one games of HALO. I hadn’t even PLAYED HALO in months, but thank God my skillz came online after about 10 minutes and I pistoled and sniper-rifled them to death so many times that both of the top dogs at the party quit and didn’t want to play anymore. I would have been severely embarrassed and depressed, had I lost to them, considering that my boy Mak and I used to whip ass on the guy that won the first HALO tournament and his crew DAILY before he won and received his MLG contract (meaning we never saw him again, or else we’d STILL be whipping his ass to this day). I tried to lighten the party’s atmosphere by informing the guys I beat that there was no way they should have beaten me anyway, because I’m a World-Class FPS gamer, but they were still shell-shocked haha :D

It’s easy for a guy to be cool, friendly & gentlemanly around you when you’re out on a date because nothing important’s happening. Yeah, he’s trying to convince you to give him some, but that’s really a reflection on YOU. When he’s gaming, it’s a reflection on HIM and his self-esteem and self-perception. Dating is basically wasting time waiting for the chick to give it up. It’s a bunch of downtime until you get to the nitty-gritty. When you’re the last guy (as usual) left on your team and it’s up to you to defeat three or four other players and accomplish your objective, that’s when every split second counts and life gets REAL.

If you have the opportunity to be around your SO when he’s in this zone, you’ll see who he really is. You’ll see what matters to him.. what makes his heart pump faster. Ask him to take out the trash now, and you might get a response you didn’t expect. Ask him if he loves you now, and he might ignore you completely. He probably didn’t actually even HEAR YOU because he’s so immersed in the game. Tell him you’re ready to go to church, and maybe he’ll quit the game to drive you there… maybe he’ll put the controller down so he can see you to the door and lock you out… maybe he’ll ignore you completely… maybe he’ll split the difference and without looking up from his game, say “PAYCE!!!… Don’t let the door HIT’cha where the Good Lord SPLIT’cha! :D”

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack/@DatingGenius

Class

Bill Cammack — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:53:05 +0000

According to Webster’s, one of the definitions of “Classy” is “Having or reflecting high standards of personal behavior”. Of course, that has to be measured subjectively, by the individual that’s judging for themselves what’s classy and what isn’t. If you take “society’s standards” as a point of reference, there are areas where I exhibit class and areas where I don’t.

I was walking down the street with a friend of mine one sunny afternoon as we were enjoying the day together. We had just come from the museum and were heading to one of my favorite places to eat and after that we were going to head to the movies. I was running my mouth about something and I noticed that there was a lady pushing an older lady in a wheelchair and she was attempting to enter a store, having understandable difficulty with the door.

Instinctively, and probably in mid-sentence, I hustled over and grabbed the door so the woman could easily push the other lady inside. They both smiled and thanked me and I smiled and said “You’re Welcome”. A few seconds later, my friend caught up, and I continued whatever I was talking about at the time.

She was smiling and says to me something like “That was really nice of you”.. To which, I replied “What was?”. I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about and started scanning my story for something in it that she might have been referring to.

When she told me she was talking about my helping the ladies enter the store, she was actually REMINDING ME that I helped the ladies enter the store. I had completely forgotten about it within seconds. That’s because I was acting instinctively and doing what I felt NEEDED to be done at that point in time. They were having trouble entering. I was trivially running my mouth. I was ABLE to help them and I hustled over to do that. Doing anything else would have been WRONG, to me. Watching them struggle to get inside and walking by with my companion like as if I didn’t see that they needed help would have been WRONG, to me. All I did was what I was SUPPOSED to do, IMO, so as quickly as it occurred to me, it was forgotten by me just as easily as I had forgotten whether I had stepped first with my left or right foot when I stepped off the curb to cross the street.

The funny thing is that it actually WAS automatic. Yes, it would have been a good gimmick to help someone in front of a chick to make her feel like you’re a great guy, huh but that’s not why I did it. I also didn’t do it to avoid looking like a chump. A lot of people do stuff that’s outside of their character because they know what’s Politically Correct at this point in time. They don’t do things because they WANT TO or because they actually FEEL they should be done, but rather in order to avoid public scrutiny or becoming a pariah on the back-channel.

Some things are automatic to people, such as making sure that a woman you’re spending time with gets inside her apartment building safely after spending time with you. Again, it’s not a gimmick. :D It’s not the old “Let me walk you home to make sure you get there safely…. OH… I need to use the bathroom” trick to get inside your house. :) If I wanted to make out with you, I would just do it wherever we are. There’s no need for me to be in your apartment. There IS a need, for me, to feel like as I’M heading home without incident, SHE got home without incident before I did.

That’s not to say I’m a nice guy. :D Everybody that knows me knows that I play by my own rules, especially when it comes to chicks. I am absolutely NOT to be trusted around chicks. I know it. Everybody else that knows me knows it. Women I meet for the first time in life can feel it. I’m addicted to women. I’m chasing a high. If being around her makes me high, it’s *ON* and ALL. BETS. ARE. OFF.

So, how do we measure class? How do we determine if someone is classy when they exhibit both chivalrous and treacherous behavior within seconds of each other?

Perhaps it comes down to a list of pros and cons? The greater good? The most good to the most people? More instances of chivalry than treachery?

When I was growing up, I was a bully. Yes, I was usually the smallest guy in a group, but I was always one of the best at sports and definitely one of the fastest thinkers and most caustic, abrasive ’snappers’ (contests between people to attempt to say things to make yourself seem superior to others or make others feel inferior to you or just make them feel poorly in general). I’ve also always had a crew, ever since I can remember, back in Kindergarten. I’ve always had lots of friends and followers. I’ve had a lot of haters as well, which were well deserved back in the day, because I used to play for keeps if someone tried to dis me. Especially if I felt your verbal attack was unwarranted, I would talk about you all day, every day, until you decided that you weren’t going to challenge me EVAR AGAIN! It just wasn’t worth it.

Eventually, my belief system changed up. My first reaction was to blame myself for being a jerk. :) I did this for who knows how many years and then I settled in the feeling that you can be as conceited as you want, so long as you don’t push your conceit on others. “I am GREAT!” doesn’t have to be accompanied by “You are WACK!”. They’re actually two entirely different sentiments and one can be expressed without the other. The trick isn’t in attempting to change how you personally feel, but rather in how you express yourself to others and mind their feelings when you interact with them.

Some people would consider this Class, and others would not. Some people feel that classy behavior is only to be found in people that are always nice to everyone and always PC and always exhibit traits that they personally consider to be classy. That’s all well & good. You can’t please everyone. This will be apparent in your Facebook Friends Count and your feed subscription stats.

It’s actually kind of funny that the first thing that occurs to me when I’m considering people disliking something I say or do in terms of online subscriptions! :D Anywayyyy…..

The way I feel about it, there’s no reason not to be cordial towards people. It’s like my man Swayze said in Road House… “Be Nice… Until it’s time to NOT BE NICE”! :D If you don’t have a bellhop’s outfit on, they’re supposed to smile at you and acknowledge you or say “Thank you”. Just in case you end up doing something nice for a jerk who doesn’t recognize that and acts like they DESERVE for you to hold the door for them, make sure you remember to say “That’s alright.. My dog doesn’t speak either.”

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

10 Reasons He Wants To Be “Just Friends”

Bill Cammack — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 16:25:11 +0000

Lindsey Chen (@LindseyChen) & Bill Cammack (@BillCammack)

Lindz & Bill present 10 Reasons He Wants To Be “Just Friends”

Related Posts
Lindsey & Bill: Does He Want To Be Friends?
Top 10 Reasons to Date a Geek
Top Ten Valentine’s Day DON’Ts!
Top 10 Mistakes Girls Make When Trying To Get A Guy
Top 10 Mistakes Guys Make When Trying To Get A Girl
10 Warning Signs That You Should Dump His Ass

Every once in a while, a gal will meet a guy that she knows likes her as a person as well as romantically, however, he refuses to make it happen… He refuses to take that extra step to start something up between them and see how it goes. This is when a gal finds herself trapped in the dreaded Friends Zone!!! :O

As usual, it’s Lindz & Bill to the rescue, with ten reasons why you might be receiving this kind of treatment. Let us know what you think in the comments section, below…

Lindz

1. He Wants to Keep His Options Open

Ladies, he would never put himself on a diet just in case he got hungry and wanted a cheeseburger and fries. The same with this situation. Tying himself down to you or any one person at all completely eliminates all the rest of the girls out there and to be honest, there are many fish in the sea. Many FINE fish in the sea that are looking for the perfect King Salmon or King Crab to go home with.

2. He’d Rather Hang Out With His Guy Friends Than Be Obligated To You

By not dating you or any other woman, he has the right to say, “No I don’t want to go to your sister’s Bat Mitzvah with you. I’d rather stay home and play Fantasy Football. Really it doesn’t matter what he is doing because if he’s not tied down to you, he has no obligation. Guys are lazy and they don’t like to commit. Maybe one night he would rather sit at home and watch porn than go to your Mom’s 60th birthday with you. Can you blame him?

3. The Holidays Are Coming Up And He’s Broke.

Having a significant other generally means that you have to get them a gift for their birthday, Christmas, Valentine’s Day. If he’s broke and legitimately cannot afford a gift for you, he may hold off on the boyfriend/girlfriend status because not getting you a gift will make him seem cheap and embarassing, and he would rather be single than be called cheap.

4. You’re Way Hotter Than Him and He’s Insecure That You’ll Leave Him

Guys really do think that way. He would rather not date you than date you and be dumped by you. Because then he would be that douchebag that got dumped by the hot girl. And it would hurt his self esteem and image for longer than you would probably be dating. He’s gotta look out for himself in this situation. That’s why you see so many good looking guys with not so good looking girls. They are confident that she’ll stick around. It’s hard being hot. I know…

5. You’re Damaged Goods (Bros Before Hoes)

Well you brought this upon yourself, what can I say? If you’re trying to hook up with a guy or date him, DO NOT.. I repeat.. DO NOT hook up, date, sleep around, flirt, text, his friends. Contrary to what you may think, guys DO talk and they will talk about that girl (YOU) who is trying to play them like they were born yesterday. So be wise and most importantly, choose wisely. One stupid drunken hook up could curse your future forever.
You’re damaged goods (Bros before Hoes)

Bill

6. He Doesn’t Want To Hit It

He thinks you’re fantastic as a person and all that, but he just doesn’t see having sex with you as being a good time. This might be because he’s not physically turned on by your body or he’s not mentally aroused by your mentality or your way of being. You might be too kinky for him or not kinky enough.. too chunky or too skinny… too prudish or too horny… you might have too much junk in the trunk or not enough bounce to the ounce! HAHA Who Knows? :D

7. You Can’t Handle It

“I’ve seen the future… I can’t afford it…” Sometimes, it becomes apparent that getting out is going to be tougher than getting in. Being that he has ZERO intentions of having sex with only you for the rest of his life, as much as he’d love to hook up with you, it’s ultimately more trouble than it’s worth. He’ll just have to be content to fantasize about it and keep it movin’! :D

8. HE Can’t Handle It

A brotha stands to potentially lose some Cool Points if he hooks up with a chick that’s TOO FOYINE and then all that “King Of My Castle” trash he’s been talking about women for YEARS suddenly evaporates into thin air. He might have to take a pass on this one in order to maintain his Social Cred.

9. Your Friendship or Business Is More Important

Keep your eyes on the prize!!! :D You don’t want to jack you career advancement because your now-ex-girlfriend doesn’t want to see your grill around the office. Bite the bullet on this one and get PizAID!!! You can pull a lot more chicks with the money you’ll be getting from this one. ;)

Also, if you expect a certain level of coolness and mental compatibility, close homegirls are hard to find. Beleedat! It’s TOTALLY not worth it to alienate a great gal because she’s sour that y’all aren’t hooking up anymore. But hey… I mean if she begs you, you might just have to do her that solid and hit her off, NAH MEEN? :D

10. You Have Lots Of Attractive Girlfriends

If he’s friends with you, you’ll introduce him to all your foyine-ass girlfriends that are always crowded around you at the parties! :D If he’s messing with you, you’re gonna hog The Kid all to yourself, and what’s the point of being SELFISH??? :D

Remember… Ain’t no fun ‘less’n your HOMEGIRLS could get some!!! :D

Lindz|@LindseyChen & Bill|@BillCammack

Content is King, NOW (Eye Candy is Over)

Bill Cammack — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:30:13 +0000

“Content is King” is a lie that’s been perpetuated in web video circles for a few years now. “Eye Candy” has always been… Queen.. but I’ve recently noticed that the tables have turned and Content actually *has* overtaken EC…

I wrote about EC in March 2008 and mentioned “the formula”, which was that whatever actual content you had, the way to get views for your show was to have an attractive female as the ‘front’ or the ‘face’ of the show. She didn’t have to know or understand JACK about JACK so long as she could look good and read her lines. I probably noticed this formula in 2007, since I got started in online video in 2006.

Regardless of the content, the most popular shows were headlined by a female that was nice to look at. Period. (with the one obvious exception being Ze Frank’s “The Show”)

It was even worse on YouTube, because everybody knew that YT took the picture that represented your video from exactly 50% into your episode. If your video was 6 minutes long, the still YT would take was @ 3 minutes. So.. Regardless of what the actual content was, people would figure out the final length of their show and insert a few frames of a chick in a bikini exactly in the middle. They’d upload their show, YouTube would pull the image of the bikini chick, all the boys would click on it expecting to see some ass, the video would get popular and then eventually ‘featured’, where it could really take off and get more views.

This worked, BTW, with videos that didn’t even have a female IN THEM, because guys couldn’t figure that out without clicking on the bikini-chick, by which time your ‘view’ was already counted. Thanks, sucker! :D

“The Formula” was so pervasive that I was discussing doing a show for these guys’ company and one of them actually said to me (verbatim) “We’d love to do a show.. but we don’t have a girl.”

Having a female headlining your show that guys would enjoy imagining having sex with was certainly the key to success back in the day, but at this point, if you look at numbers of YouTube subscribers as well as episode views, Content has clearly come into its own as guys and gals who are actually talking about something intelligent or providing some kind of actual entertainment value to their viewers have vastly outpaced the “Look at me and my tits” chicks.

I mean, VASTLY, like left them in the dust. I didn’t think it would happen, but it has, and there’s no end in sight. I think what happened is that the early adopters enjoyed success at the time, because they were the only ones doing it. Now that everybody and their sister has a YouTube channel and is doing the exact same thing, it’s tough to gain new followers / subscribers. As a matter of fact, an annoying trend has developed, where people actually ASK YOU not only to subscribe to their channels, but to rate their episode “5 Stars”. :/ … Um… How are you going to TELL SOMEONE what to rate your episode? wow. “Please rate my episode” I can understand. “Please rate it 5 Stars” (Top Rating Available)? Come on. :/

So.. If you don’t have any girls (or, no *attractive* girls), do your show ANYWAY. *THIS* is your time! :D Eye Candy is OVER!

You have as much chance of your show becoming popular as anyone else. So long as you have a good topic that’s sustainable (you can consistently release episodes ad infinitum), the viewing public is willing to accept, watch, listen to, follow, friend, subscribe, rate and virally pass your show on to their friends & relatives.

If you don’t believe me, go check out the current Revision3 lineup, including my friend Anthony Carboni’s show, “Bytejacker”.

Blog about what you’re passionate about in text, audio or video.. Be consistent, relevant, informative & entertaining and you have a shot at becoming popular in the ‘online video’ game.

Content, at this point, truly *IS* King, so the only things limiting you are your own imagination, creativity and determination.

Make It Happen! :D

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

Big City Dating (Meet The Parents)

Bill Cammack — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:00:04 +0000

I was watching a documentary last night about ultra-legendary actor Morgan Freeman offering to pay for a high school in Mississippi to have its first ever INTEGRATED. PROM. in the Year of Our Lord 2008 AD!!! :/. The thing that struck me as the most interesting (and, granted, as an editor, I know that I can make footage look like anything I want it to) was that the kids seemed okay with each other during regular everyday interactions. It wasn’t like the white kids and the black kids (according to the edit) disliked each other and were being forced to have an integrated prom… in 2008 AD.

When asked why they were still having segregated proms although the school had been integrated since IIRC 1970….. hmm.. They were pretty late to the table with THAT to begin with! :D But the point is that when asked, everyone in the video pointed the finger at parents and school board members (read: still more old-ass people).

When the old-ass people were interviewed, they either shrugged their shoulders like “I don’t know why” or said something to the effect of “That’s how it’s always been” like as if they’re still watching 13″ Black & White Televisions because that’s what they had when they grew up. :/ I’ll give the interviewees PROPS for getting on screen and talking AT ALL. Cheers to them for making their ideas known and expressing themselves. :) Seriously. There was one guy that was younger who was willing to talk to the camera, but he needed to be blurred out. They probably didn’t even use his voice.

This one father was explaining why he didn’t want his white daughter to date a black dude, and I couldn’t believe he was still rocking the ancient excuse “She doesn’t realize how tough it’s going to be on the kids!”. The question is.. WHY would it be “tough on the kids” if they were bi-racial or mulatto or whatever they’re calling themselves these days? I’ll tell you why….. Because there are way too many people in other people’s business in a town with only 2,100 RESIDENTS!!! (IIRC). 2,100 RESIDENTS!!!… My High School had 3,000 kids in it, ONLY attending 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grades. My island (Manhattan, New York City) has A MILLION PEOPLE ON IT. If something’s “tough on the kids” on 54th street.. Guess what? You hang out on 55th street. Or 53rd street. Or in Queens or Brooklyn or The Bronx or Staten Island or take the Path train to Jersey…

Meet The Parents

In “Do You Have Relationship Role Models?”, Liz Rizzo writes:

“But it is also a little strange to never be around people’s parents ever. To never have those relationships to look to as potential examples you can learn from. That’s what I think of when I think of South Florida. That back where I’m from there are so many people who regularly see their parents and their friends’ parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles.”

When I read that, I really had to think about it… Other than girls who I dated that actually lived ~1/4 mile in any direction from my house, the last time I met kids’ parents was in Elementary School when we had sleepovers. Most of the kids that I knew had parents that both had jobs, so if we went to their houses, they were never there. By the time they arrived, I was already back at my house eating dinner. As far as the local mothers & fathers, the only reason they knew I was spending time with their daughters was because I would still be there when they arrived. That was always a conscious decision that I made. I could have remained in Ghost Mode and they would never have seen me with their daughters, evAr, even though they lived three blocks from my house. I’ve messed with chicks while their parents were in the same house with us but on different floors and they never even knew I LIKED their daughters. The concept of introducing myself to a chick’s parents as a potential suitor is mentally akin for me to actually putting on a suit of armor, picking up a lance, getting on a horse and jousting. It just never crosses my mind.

There’s no such thing in NYC as “Pick a chick up from her house” or “Sit down with her parents and chat”… For What? :D Nobody cares about their opinion anyway. Whatever they say to you, you tell them what they want to hear and then go ahead and do whatever you were going to do with their daughter in the first place. It’s irrelevant and a waste of time. However….. If you live in a town with 2,100 residents, everybody’s going to know if you’re kickin’ it with someone’s daughter SOONER rather than LATER so your best bet is to get dressed up and step to the parents, hoping they approve of y’all’s relationship. Someone that knows her family works at the diner. Cain’t go there! Someone works at the baseball field. Cain’t go there! Someone works at the drive-in theatre. Cain’t go there! Even if you don’t go ANYWHERE with a chick, SOMEBODY’S going to recognize her car in your part of town even if you hide it in your garage while she’s there, so you may as well forget about keeping it on the QT.

Urban Nomads

Photo Credit: J-Rad

When I was growing up, we were basically nomads. We were just about always in the street, “hanging out”. New York City has an extensive mass transit system and when we were in school, we had bus passes and train passes, meaning we could go anywhere we wanted for free. The trains never stopped running, either. Many-A-Time, post-HS, I waited for the subway to come and get me @ 5am to take me home from a club.

Where would we meet chicks? In the street. Other than that, one guy would have met one gal previously and invited her to bring her girlfriends to hang out with us. Basically, we kept it moving and got whatever the day brought us. Similar to Genghis Khan, we would roll somewhere, set up camp, enjoy whatever the locality had for us and then eventually retreat back around the way and do it all again tomorrow. There’s no reason to go to a chick’s house, because you met her in the street. She obviously knows how to get outside of her crib and travel places. There’s no reason to hang out with her within her neighborhood, where people are likely to recognize her and get in your business. In Manhattan, there are some blocks with three CROWDED bars within 50 steps of each other, with several areas in each bar. It’s easy to disappear INSIDE OF A BAR with a chick by ‘hiding’ amongst people that you don’t know. Worst-case scenario, if the bathroom has a lock on it, it’s ON! ;)

It’s not so much that people aren’t TRYING to be in our business here.. It’s that they CAN’T! :D There are too many places to be, too many ways to get around and too many ways to communicate. Your daughter’s sitting down eating with you, her phone vibrates, she reads the text and floats out the door and your information after that is ZERO. If you think you’re slick by being nosey and going through her phone, you probably won’t get Rihanna’d up, but the guy’s phone number is going to have a girl’s name on it and there won’t be any valuable information in the text stream, so your snooping won’t get you anywhere. Even if you somehow find out where she’s going, you’re not going to embarrass yourself by coming inside. :) Next thing you know, she takes two steps out of the bar, flags a taxi and is gone to who-knows-where again. That’s life in the big city. Your best bet is to have a friendly relationship to your kids so they trust you with information rather than evading you, which is insanely easy to do.

All Day… And All Of The Night

The guy in the film who was attempting to keep his daughter from her boyfriend placed a curfew on her to come right home after school, IIRC. That’s a good idea, however, how long do you think it takes to spend time with your daughter? Last I understood about American schools, they get something called lunchtime, which could be anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. You think she’s not SAVORING EVERY MINUTE she has with this guy, since you’re restricting her the rest of the time? Also, last I checked, kids went to school starting around 8:30 and ended school around 3:30, which is seven hours that you have no Line Of Sight on your daughter whatsoever. Between classes they might share together, study halls, absent teachers and deliberately cutting class together, they’re probably spending MORE TIME with each other during school hours than they would have spent AFTER school, meaning he probably wouldn’t see her so much during the daytime if he knew he was going to hang out with her in the evening, so it balances out anyway.

Oh.. Also… I hope you don’t have a job. Here in NYC, most kids get out of school either @ 2:30 or 3:30 and their parents don’t get off of their 9-5s until..… you guessed it!!! FIVE! :D That’s a scot-free hour and a half every single day in your own crib right under your nose. So if you think you’re slick by grounding her and calling home at 4pm to make sure she’s there, listen carefully for sneezing, dishes clinking or male laughter in the background. Also.. The second you get off the phone with her, assume she did anything she wanted inside or outside of your crib until mass transit can bring you into potential visual contact with your house… because she DID.

Once again, as a parent, it’s going to be imperative for you to be the ruler, yes.. but also someone that your kid LIKES and TRUSTS and doesn’t see as some kind of warden that’s to be avoided and evaded at all costs. If you live in the sticks, you can get away with attempting to lock down her time because the pharmacist is going to let you know when they saw your daughter and so is the gym teacher and the assistant principal and the ~~gas station~~ general store owner. In a big city, it doesn’t work like that. There’s nowhere that we HAVE to go, so we COULD be anywhere. I’ve personally received texts and changed my plans for the day in a split second because something better came up, so even if you require an explanation of where she’s going, it’s useless as soon as she walks out the door. Until they come up with portable video telephones, when you call your daughter and she tells you she’s @ Suzy Mae’s house, you have no choice but to believe her.

Your Mom’s In My Business

Ultimately, I wish the parents luck in achieving their goals in life, regardless of how unrealistic they might be. I wish for them authentic, healthy relationships with their kids. It’s going to take INTELLIGENCE to achieve that, not sanctions and embargoes and curfews and taking away phones and throwing out her clothes that you think make her look like a slut.

Her “slutty clothes” and her other kinky paraphernalia are stashed at her girlfriend’s house, or, even more disappointing to you, at her boyfriend’s house! ;)

You can’t stop the bum rush. If your daughter sees something she likes, she’s gonna come after it. If you try to stop her, it’s only going to make her feel more ravenous for what you don’t want her to have and she’s going to maximize the time she DOES get with this guy… Capisce? :D Make it clear to her what you feel and what your values are and what you’re hoping for her future and if y’all have a decent relationship to each other, she MIGHT keep your desires in mind when she’s in the streets doing whatever she wants to do.

As far as people that are still dating.. It’s tough enough to avoid your FRIENDS getting in your business about who you should or shouldn’t date and why. It’s tougher to have to deal with your parents putting in their two cents about the situation. It’s toughEST to have to deal with your parents not wanting you to date someone so that YOUR PARENTS don’t have to get grilled by THEIR FRIENDS about why they’re “letting” you date that person. They’re not worried in. the. least. for YOU or your mulatto kids. They’re worried about THEMSELVES and their social standing in a community that’s still trying to relive the past. If they were worried about YOU, they’d want you to date someone that puts a smile on your face and returns you home safely to your crib every. single. night. They’d ask you if he treats you respectfully and seems proud to spend time with you and let people know that you’re his girlfriend.

If you live in the sticks, you might have to eat it for a while until you can get a job and get your own place so you can stop hearing “As long as you’re under MY roof, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah”. Hopefully, by the time you get out from under the oppression, you still have a LOVING feeling towards your parents. Sometimes, they’re right. Sometimes, you’re dating a CRUMB and you don’t recognize it because you feel so in love with this guy right now… The way to tell if they’re being selfish is to ask yourself “What does that have to do with ME?”. “It’ll be hard on the kids”? What kids? What if you don’t HAVE kids with him? Does that make the relationship cool? Nope. There’s something else. You won’t be able to get a job. You won’t win the town beauty pageant. Your teachers will give you lower grades if you date him. I’ll disown you. I’ll kick you out of our home. I’ll give away your trust fund to the church. It’s always SOMETHING! :D

Good Luck With That! ;)

~Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

Players (Dating)

Bill Cammack — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:49:36 +0000

Every so often, a word gets stolen or misused by someone and that word becomes a part of popular culture and retains the new meaning, going forward. One of these myriad words is “Player”.

I’m extremely tired of people using the word “Player” when all they actually mean is “He doesn’t want a ‘relationship’ with a chick, but he’s down to screw them”. The reason this happened is that most people have exactly ZERO idea of what they’re doing when it comes to dating, which is why they use terms like “getting lucky”. Anything outside of what THEY THINK should go on during dating is considered to be some kind of conspiracy. If you’re not down with the get married, have kids, croak pattern, then either there’s something wrong with you or you’re deliberately jacking the system.

Let me tell you now… There’s a distinct difference between actual Players and guys that just plain like girls and are going to mess with as many as they can before they (the guys) become busted-looking and their career is completely over. Of course there are lots of levels to this, but let’s just stick to this basic separation for now.

*I* am a Player. What makes me a Player is that it’s all business to me. I’m leaving either NOTHING or as little as possible to chance. If a chick turns me on, I get a certain energy that tells me what to do. The goal from then on is to get to the nitty-gritty. I’m attempting to get what I want ASAP. *NOW*, if possible! :D I don’t’ care what your future plans are. I don’t care how many kids you want to have. I don’t care where you want to live 5 years from now or where you’ll be in your career. I want to do what I want to do and I’m going to do my DAMNEDEST to make that happen… NOW! :D

This has been described to me in myriad ways. My friend Joyce calls it “Always On”, haha because I’m always angling for whatever I can get from a chick. Another gal told me “You’re the guy I’m scared of meeting when I go out to parties”. Chicks I’ve actually been dating at the time have informed me of their impressions of my way of being, and I’ve been amazed at their insight whilst in the heat of things.

I’m from New York City. There’s nothing but competition in this town. There’s someone taller than you, richer than you, smarter than you, cuter than you, funnier than you, that dresses better than you, has a better car than you, wears better jewelry than you, is more popular than you, more talented than you, blogs more than you……. ok, maybe not blogs more than THE KID! haha but you get the picture. You have two choices in this town.. Take the scraps that are available to you, the leftovers from the guys that are actually makin’ it happen and turning chicks on, or figure out how to get in the game and make it happen for yourself.

My friend Karen (Thanks A Lot, Karen… Good Lookin’ Out! :/) recently posted a picture that was taken of me when I was in High School. There are eight (8) guys in that picture. I would have been exactly in SLOT NUMBER EIGHT to get the rap if some random chick had walked down the street and happened across all of us. LAST. I have no idea what the actual pecking order would have been, because I wasn’t paying attention to that stuff at the time, but all the guys had gimmicks that I personally didn’t have in my arsenal at the time. ‘Matter of fact, I *HAD* no arsenal at the time! :D

Chicks just like me. Not all of them, but ENOUGH of them. Because of that, up until HS, I had never developed any format for pulling chicks. It’s just a gift from God. Thanks, God! :D I’ve literally been ASLEEP and chicks have woken me up to talk to me. Like. Actually. Asleep, and when I woke up, I was at a party and some chick is tapping me on my shoulder wanting to kick it to me hahaha. That’s happened more than once, due to the fact that I hang out with people that have my back entirely, so I’m perfectly safe going to sleep anywhere at any time. If I don’t get my second wind, wake me up when the party’s over so I can get out of someone’s house! :D

Anyway… That’s all well and good if you’re not around guys with specific plans on how they’re going to pull chicks. They have the right jewelry. They have the clean sneakers. They have the Lees with the sewn-in crease. They ironed their fat laces. Their name buckle’s shiny. They got their ‘line’ done (got their haircut shaped up perfectly). They practiced their Electric Boogie routines. They know the lines to say to chicks to get them to lay down ASAP. They know which chicks are down for the action regardless of what you say to them. They’re wearing the latest clothes. They have murals painted on the back of their denim jackets. They have the right AC/DC and The Who patches. Their parents are rich and live on Park Avenue and they’re rarely home and they have a liquor cabinet…..

This is why I’m a Player. I’ve had to overcome too many obstacles in my life to leave dating to chance. When your allowance is $20/week and your homeboy’s allowance is $150/week…… IN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL!!! :/ You end up looking like a BROKE MotherTrucker.

Meanwhile, dudes are ACCUSED of being Players just because they happened to mess with you AND your cousin last summer. Sorry. That doesn’t qualify you as a player that you messed with two chicks that happen to be blood-related. You can get extra points for it and a pat on the back from the fellaz, but *ONLY* if at least one of them knew you were already messing with the other one. If you pulled two girls that just so happen to be related, who cares? Ultimate Dap if you hooked up with them simultaneously, but that’s not normally the situation. What normally happens is that just because a guy thinks a chick is attractive and he wants to spend some intimate time with her, she thinks he’s angling for some sort of exclusive relationship. If that’s not the direction it goes, her girlfriends are like “Oh!.. So he’s a PLAYER, HUH? :/” as they commiserate over Häagen-Dazs.

The reason this is important is that the non-Players aren’t getting a fair shake. Just because they don’t conform to your idea of what’s supposed to go on when a guy and a gal hook up, you label them as something they’re actually not and then here come the sanctions and embargoes against the guy for just being who he is, whether he tells you about it straight up or you hear it through the grapevine. Doesn’t it make sense that the guys with no game or no looks or no money are going to be MORE LIKELY to take what they can get from a chick? It’s not that they’re being deliberately manipulative… They’re just trying to live their lives and have some good times with some chicks they think are FOYINE!!! (haha, right, Corinne? :D).. They’re not doing ANYTHING underhanded to you. They honestly like you… AND your cousin… AND your moms, if she’s still got it like that! ;)

I was watching one of these infinitely-produced COPS-type shows and they had to go to a trailer park for a domestic disturbance. The chick was wildin’ out and the cops removed her from the guy’s trailer and put her in a cab to her relative’s house. When they were talking to the guy on camera, they asked him about her demeanor. He said (and I wish I could remember verbatim), essentially “She’s completely a *JERK*, but I’m a fat, unattractive guy… \o/”. Guys will take whatever they can get. It doesn’t make them Players / manipulators. They’re just tryin’na Live The Dream!

The funny thing about all this is that the Players know how to make themselves look like regular dudes and the regular dudes don’t know how to make themselves NOT look like Players, haha so most of the time, women are looking in the wrong direction when they’re trying to figure out who’s going to “take the money & run”. There’s no distinction made for the set of guys that are just trying to enjoy an attractive female’s company without turning it into some kind of overblown production about “what this means” and “where is this going?”. It’s like “Dudes that want to get married” and “Players”. :/

What makes the situation even worse is that there are lots of Players that would LOVE to get married and DO get married. Let HER make all the money while I play video games all day and listen to how her day was when she comes home? HAHA “But Where Does Homey Sign? :(” hahaha You Bet! There are lots of dudes that hook up with some rich chick so they can lamp in her crib and live off her money while they still hook up with whatever other chicks they want. Actually, there are dudes that hook up with POOR CHICKS for the same reason! :O .. She’s getting X amount in food stamps, plus money from “her baby’s father” every month? Sign A Brotha UP! :D Spread the wealth, amongst other things!

As I always say.. The only way around this is checks & balances. If you date people that you have mutual friends with that you can trust, you’ll most likely be alright. 325 Mutual Facebook Friends aren’t going to ALL steer you wrong if you ask them questions about a guy you’re thinking about dating or at least hooking up with. In the year 2009, the reasons for dating someone that NONE of your friends have ever heard of is ZERO. Start making groups of guys and gals that go out together all as friends and see if anything develops from there. Make as many pressure-free situations as you can where you get to spend time with guys and see what they’re really like. Is he paying attention to you, or checking out ass every second he can? hahaha Not that *I* know anyone like THAT, but still! :D

So give these guys a break. They’re not PLAYERS, just because they’re not going to commit to you or anyone else. If you ever run into an ACTUAL Player, you may very well learn the difference and start to appreciate ‘regular’ guys that aren’t going to lie, cheat & steal to get into your panties by any means necessary! haha YA HEARD? :D

~Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

Smart Girls Finish Last

Bill Cammack — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:39:10 +0000

So I’m talking to an intelligent female friend of mine the other day and she says something to the effect of she can’t bring herself to read my blog because I have all these stories about stupid women. :D

After I finished laughing, or at least I wasn’t laughing so loud that I could hear her speaking again, she says something like “Why do guys even DATE dumb women? I just don’t get it.”

Being that I thought that this was obvious to everyone on both dating ‘teams’, I never really thought to get into this.

Selection Processes

In order to understand how guys or gals are going to select “significant others”, you have to understand what they do when they don’t have a girlfriend or boyfriend. The SO is going to REPLACE whatever it is that they normally focus on. The only reason to stop what you’re currently doing is to do something BETTER. Does that make sense? :D

So.. Women, for instance… What do they do when they don’t have a man? Shop & Eat. That’s about it. Of course they go to work, but I’m saying what they do with their leisure time. If you’re still reading this, bear with me… I’m getting to the point. :D

Meanwhile… What are the fellaz doing? Chasing chicks or checking out some format of hard- or soft-core pornography, including eye-candy-with-no-actual-content chicks on YouTube.

When you combine these two groups, you get people who SEEM to be looking for the same thing, but they’re actually not…

The women are looking for someone to eat, shop & read books with. Sex is actually an incidental issue.. It’s like a fringe benefit if her boyfriend knows what to do with her body. It’s not even the chocolate icing on the chocolate cupcake.. It’s the one, single, curly line of frosting that goes down the middle and over the top. It’s like a surprise or something if the sex is actually good.

Meanwhile.. The guys are looking for someone to replace their porno collection.
That’s about it.

We already have people to have intelligent conversations with and to do our hobbies with, like Video Games, Paintball & Chasing Chicks…… Those are called OTHER GUYS.

Lack Of Communication

And now we arrive at the answer to my friend’s question. :) Guys end up dating dumb women because a) Being smart isn’t in her job description and b) The only way we would know if she were intelligent or not would be to actually listen to what she’s saying.

If you’ve ever noticed, there’s no speaking in porno. I mean some of them have a script, yes… but you see how the so-called “actors” don’t even TRY to make it realistic? That’s because the speaking is only used to set up the scenario for the sex.

This is how it works in real life, too.

When a guy’s speaking to a gal that he likes, he’s merely setting up the scenario for the sex. It won’t SEEM like a setup to her because most guys don’t know what they’re doing and are just running their mouths until they get a chance to kiss her, and the guys that DO know what they’re doing aren’t going to SEEM like they’re doing what they’re doing… Capisce? ;)

Same Game, Different Rules

This is the disconnect my intelligent female friend (I’m just repeating this so you know who I’m talking about without my saying her name. It’s not like I’m saying my ONE intelligent female friend. I have several.) has with this situation. Being that she’s female, she actually pays attention to what guys say. If the guy were an idiot or a narcissist or a misanthrope or a sociopath or whatever, she’d exclude that person from her pool of viable guys to date. That’s not how it works with guys. As Spike Lee said in “She’s Gotta Have It”, You don’t throw away a Rolls Royce because it has a dent in it.

The defining factor for guys in selecting females is whether y’all turn us on or not. Period. Everything else is a fringe benefit. If you happen to be smart? Good for US! :D .. doesn’t matter, though. You’re not crazy? (at least you haven’t been certified by an actual psychiatrist) Good for US! :D .. doesn’t matter, though. You know how to cook? balance a checkbook? juggle bowling pins? play Ms. Pac Man? make a shawl out of two pairs of shorts and a bowtie? GOOD FOR US!!! :D …… doesn’t matter, though. :D

If you need evidence of this, search the blogs for career women who can’t understand why their man “cheated” on them with some sexy female burger-flipper. All this clamoring about how accomplished she is and how the new chick dropped out of college, yadda yadda… Here’s a tip: Unless the guy’s a leech and considers you his sugar momma, nobody cares about how much money you make or how successful you are. If the intern’s about to get under the desk with the cigar, it’s about to be ON and POPPIN’! :D

~ Bill Cammack | @DatingGenius

Marissa Mayer Discusses SkyNet… er, Google

Bill Cammack — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:06:22 +0000

21 minutes into this video, Kevin Rose asks Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience, Marissa Mayer “Is Google Skynet?” on behalf of someone who asked the question online and 182 people who voted for that question.

Her first two words are “Uhhhh.. Well…. :D”

There are a lot of people that think Google is SkyNet. What’s SkyNet?

Skynet (Terminator): In the fictional Terminator universe, Skynet is a computer software-based defense system created by humans in the late 20th century.

In the Terminator storyline, Skynet gains sentience shortly after it is placed in control of all of the U.S. military’s weaponry. When they realize that it has become self-aware, and what the computer control is capable of, the human operators try to shut the system down. It retaliates and believes humans are a threat to its existence, it then employs humankind’s own weapons of mass destruction in a campaign to exterminate the human race.

The obvious parallel with Google is that every time you turn around, Google’s acquired another company or created or announced a new product. The bottom line is data. Information. Evidence of connections. The attempt to predict patterns… purchasing tendencies… communications networks… social trends…

Why is data important? Because we have moved from interpersonal conversation to Pony Express… From letters to phone calls… From phone calls to email… From email to text messages… From text messages to instant messages… From instant messages to transparent communications via apps/sites like Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook… Now, we’re moving into audio and video communications via Oovoo, Skype, Ustream, LiveStream… It’s all data. It’s all information. It all says something about us and the people we interact with and the products we buy or avoid. Someday, it will be aggregated into a meaningful report which will be used by whomever figures it out to make a lot of money.

An example of how this works is Facebook. Instead of hiding my status, I’ve declared myself “single” on Facebook, so they use that information to send me an endless stream of “dating” and “meet women of such and such a type” advertisements on the right side of my screen. I can look forward to at least 60 such ads on any given day, being that they fit 3 on a page. How did they know I might be interested in women available for sex? Because I clicked “single” for status and “women” as far as interests. Elementary… Peep it for yourself:

The reason this is useful is that in order to sell things to people on the internet, you need to be able to prove demographics to a reasonable degree. You have to be able to say to a potential advertiser “I can place your ad for single women in front of 40,000 guys who are looking for girls [who are looking for guys] in this amount of time, for which you will owe me this amount of money”. This is why they want you to use their services, so they can collect data on what you like, what you use, what you endorse, what you dislike, who you follow and who follows you. The “following” part indicates social networks as well as potential spheres of influence.

To go off on a tangent for a second… This is why some people were really hoppin’ mad over Twitter’s “Suggested User List”. At the time that I checked out this list, there was a CAT (like, somebody’s actual pet) on this list, and President-Elect Barack Obama was NOT on this list (Though Al Gore was). People were (and probably still are) mad about this because they weren’t chosen to be ON this list and their standings as influential people on Twitter plummeted faster than people’s bank accounts who had invested money with Bernie Madoff.

Suddenly, people who had ZERO standing in the fishbowl whatsoever were getting thousands and in some cases TENS OF THOUSANDS of new followers on a daily basis. The people who used to be able to press their chests out at having 60,000 followers had to sit there and watch as people raced towards 1 Million followers and beyond. What difference did this make? The people with tens of thousands of followers were looking forward to leveraging that and being seen as influential people in the Twitter space. They’re still way more influential than I am, with my current 2,604 followers, but they’ve been entirely eclipsed by the people that get followers almost as quickly as Twitter gets new users.

I wanted to bring this up because I was having a vigorous discussion today with a friend of mine who’s a rabid conspiracy theorist and she really sparked me to talk about this stuff. The fact of the matter is that the price of admission to any of these sites is giving them direct access to information about the people you know, products and sites you use and your likes & dislikes. When you click “like” on Facebook, that’s recorded. When you click “favorite” on Twitter, that’s recorded. When you follow someone or someone follows you, that’s recorded. The real question here is whether you can afford to be involved or you can afford to NOT be involved…

There’s an easy way not to have your information collected and utilized… Don’t do JACK on the internet. For some people, this is the solution. Don’t put the data out there and you won’t have to worry about it. That’s not the solution for me, personally. According to Google Analytics, Google was responsible for 6,291 of my visits last month, which is 65.48% of the 9,555 total visits to my site. I am fully entrenched and willing to sink or swim on the internet with SkyNet. :D I even went out and bought the G1 Google Phone as the picture to the left just so happened to catch rebooting… even though that was more because of the Android platform and physical keyboard than my stellar Google search result standings.

Ultimately, conspiracy or not, it’s clear that we’re trending towards MORE information being available about everyone rather than less. We’re all communicating with each other more through digital, collectable means. We used to use tokens, now we use MetroCards. We used to have bank books, now we have ATM Cards. We used to write checks, now we have Credit Cards. We have data plans on our computers AND our phones. We socialize with each other more ON the internet than off. It’s way easier and way more efficient than getting on trains and planes and actually going to other states, countries and continents where our friends live. More and more socializing that was done OFFline is now being done ONline. Same thing goes for business. For example I can now share my computer’s screen with clients via the internet instead of having to travel to edit for them or train them on-site.

With or without you, SkyNet’s on the move! :D The decision YOU have to make is whether you’re going to get with the program and go with the flow or keep your information to yourself and do things the old fashioned way. When I traveled to Delaware… (Delaware), I met a bus driver who was also a prize-winning Chicken Farmer. I guarantee you that he’s not interested in SkyNet AT. ALL! :D However, his business doesn’t depend on the internet. People need to eat. People like to each chicken. People like eggs. He’s going to get paid regardless of what Google does…

Can you say the same thing?

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

How To Pretend To Listen (Cricket Status)

Bill Cammack — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 11:50:00 +0000

So.. Let’s say, hypothetically, that you’re dating someone that likes to run their mouth ad infinitum about NEVER ANYTHING IMPORTANT… What you need to learn is how to seem like you’re paying attention to their drivel when you’re actually not.

This is important because if you actively ignore them, it could have adverse effects on your getting laid. Later for THAT! :D .. However, you also can’t afford to focus on what they’re saying to you, because a) it’s completely meaningless and devoid of educational content and b) it’s 4th & 3 on the 12 yard line.

Cricket Status

So the way to deal with this is to process what your SO’s saying in the background, meaning they’re saying it in the foreground, probably actually in between you and the television, but you mentally place them in the background, similar to crickets.

You know how you don’t hear when crickets START chirping?… And then, all of a sudden, you’re like WHAT’S THAT CONSTANT NOISE??? That’s because you HEARD the crickets get started with that ish, but since cricket-chirping doesn’t matter at all, there was no reason to focus on it until all your foreground sound stopped and then the crickets are suddenly really loud. This is the space you have to relegate your SO’s voice to.

Similar to the crickets, you won’t miss out on anything useful by ignoring what your SO’s saying… Like, they don’t know anything about football, so they’re not likely to accurately predict what the next play might be or what the coach is thinking right now. They don’t know anything about driving, so they can’t give you tips on how to drive better while you’re driving. They don’t know anything about danger, so they can’t warn you when it’s time to Break North With No Delay.

I’ve reminded myself of an example. I was skimming through a show my DVR picked up the other day, and it was stories from television field producers about their episodes. This chick gets on the screen and says “I’ve been in some dangerous situations” and then goes on to list a) being in a prison (not as an inmate.. as a chick with a video camera), and b) being in the projects. She mistakenly categorized being in a prison as a guest as MORE DANGEROUS than being in the projects. That’s because she has no actual grasp on reality.

If you go to a prison as a chick with a video camera that was sent there by an international television network, they are going to MAKE. $&%*#^%. SURE. that NOTHING happens to you… NUTH-THANG. NOTHING. You might be AROUND dangerous people, but you’re surrounded by guards and security measures that have your back. If you go to the projects… where do you think the inmates live when they get out of jail, stupid?

So… The projects are OBVIOUSLY way more dangerous than a prison, because you’re on your own. No warden, No guards, No guest badge. Nothing. It’s you and your camera vs anyone that feels like chumping you off. This is an example of someone who will just be saying BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH when it comes to security issues, because she doesn’t know what she’s talking about and you may as well focus on IMPORTANT sounds that might help you navigate the situation safely.

Anyway… Here’s how you act like you’re paying attention when you’re really not…. Feel free to test this out on people you’re not trying to hook up with until you get good at it so you don’t actually fumble a few good physical experiences if you get caught.

How To Get Your “Ignore” On And Still Get Laid

This technique can be a REAL mental energy saver! :D Normally, what happens is that you have to listen to an entire sentence that someone says, figure out the meaning of it, figure out the relevance of it and then attempt to squeeze blood from a stone until you figure out that, no.. there was ZERO USEFUL CONTENT in what they just said. This takes a long time.

Eventually, you get to the point that you realize that the person you’ve been wasting time listening to never begins speaking from a position of relevance. If I’m watching THE GAME, try to say something useful about THE GAME. I don’t care how your day was right now (read: Ever, as in “I NEVER care how your day was, especially not when it’s 4th & 3 on the 12). This is when, for efficiency & sanity’s sake, you need to relegate your SO’s voice to Cricket Status. Chirp Chirp Chirp, Blah Blah Blah, it’s all the same.

The way the actual technique works is that you’re watching the game, right… Every once in a while, you dart your eyes in your SO’s direction as if they matter right now. This adds to the illusion of paying attention. When you get better at this, you don’t even have to take your eyes off the game! :D

Now, in every set of words, there’s going to be a beginning, and end and a couple of key words that you need to catch. The beginning and end are both marked by a pause in between. The key word(s) could occur anywhere within the sentences. Once you’re sure you’ve figured out the key words, memorize those and mentally throw all the rest of what they just rambled on about in the trash. Now you can watch the game without incident while your SO chirps away.

Eventually, similar to crickets, your SO will stop making noise. This is usually when they reach a saturation point and require input from you so they can believe they’re involved in a two-way conversation. This is the pause I mentioned above and this is your time for action. If you’re lucky (or.. UNLUCKY, depending on how you see things), the pause never happens and your SO gets off on the fact that they’re talking. If this is the case, don’t bother with this technique. If they ever stop talking, just say “oh yeah?” and they’ll launch into another inane soliloquy.

Once you hear the pause, this is the only time that you’re going to divert attention from what really matters in life. This is when you utilize those key words that you’ve been retaining. Use a questioning tone, meaning the pitch of your voice should go higher towards the end. Depending on your current level of proficiency, you may or may not have to look at them while you’re speaking. Ask them a question based on the key words and then repeat the process of parsing their reply for the next key words and trashing everything else they say.

Sometimes, you get lucky, and the key words occur right in the front, so you can start ignoring them immediately. Let’s say their monologue is “So, today at work, I blah blah blah blah blah blah blah”. When you detect the pause, you say “So ALL THAT happened AT WORK?” Try to sound like you’re amazed. That normally gets them to wax poetic and go into more detail about the situation so you can ignore them longer before the next pause.

If they say “I was thinking about where we should go on vacation and it’s between Cancun and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah”, when you hear the pause, you say “What exactly do you like about Cancun?”. Get it? :)

This works like a charm, and at the end of your program, sports event or trying to write a dating blog post, you feel like you experienced 90% of it instead of 40% of it because you wasted so much time attempting to find the needle in the haystack… which would have been the useful content in whatever your SO was rambling on and on about.

Advanced Application

When you get REALLY good at this and into the advanced stages, you can stop talking altogether and use facial expressions to communicate with your over-talkative SO. When you hear the pause occur, tilt your head slightly and furrow your brow. This translates as “WHAT???” to the talker, and they’ll start explaining their position, which buys you more quality time. If you wait for the pause and then lift your head up in the air while raising at least one eyebrow, this indicates “OHHHHH”, like you understand what they just said. This reinforces their belief that you care what they’re talking about and prompts them to tell you more….. Chirp Chirp Chirp.

~ Bill Cammack

Euphemisms For Sex

Bill Cammack — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 12:46:31 +0000

There are lots of euphemisms people use instead of saying “having sex”. Some of them make sense and others don’t.

They’re normally used to either dress sex UP or dress it DOWN.. To make sex cooler than it really was or to play it off like the physical act didn’t happen at all by describing some peripheral event that may or may not have actually accompanied the sex… such as SLEEPING. :/

Here are 10 euphemisms for sex that come to mind, in no particular order:

Getting Laid makes sense, because for the most part, you’re going to be laying down while you’re doing it… unless you have her leg up on a counter or she’s on her hands and knees, doggie-style…

Sleeping Together makes NO SENSE, because most of the time that one or more of you are asleep, there’s no sex going on… MOST of the time! ;)

Getting Some makes sense, because you’re not specifying “Getting Some WHAT?”.

Having An Affair makes no sense at all, unless one of the parties involved is married. If both people are single, there’s no “affair” to be had. It’s just sex.

Getting On makes sense, because unless you’re doing “Woman On Top”, you’re getting on top of her to some degree.

Knocking Boots makes sense as a slang escalation… The way slang works is that if someone does one thing, you want to represent that you did it bigger, better or harder than they did. Therefore, the term “Knock Your Socks Off”, meaning do something fantastic, had to be one-upped! :D So while it might be tough to knock someone’s socks off, it would be even TOUGHER to knock their BOOTS off and therefore a greater accomplishment.

Getting Paid as a slang term doesn’t really make sense. I would have to guess that the origin is rhyming “paid” with “laid”? \o/ (<= That's the little "I don't know" man with his hands up in the air, shrugging… in case you were wondering :D) It makes sense if you're a gigolo or a hooker, so maybe the term originated from those segments of society.

Getting Lucky makes sense only if you felt like you didn’t deserve to have sex with her in the first place. Did you get lucky when you got your last paycheck from work? No. You worked for it, earned it and received it. If you feel like it’s LUCK when a chick feels like hooking up with you, it’s time to reevaluate your skillz and step your game up. Srsly.

Tagging Up makes sense from the standpoint of Graffiti culture and Locker Room Talk culture. It’s a combination of the two because Tagging is writing on walls, like, putting your name on something, representing that you were there. Obviously, you don’t actually write on the chick, unless she’s sweating the dilznick so much that she gets your name tattooed on her body… But the point is that you get to tell the fellaz that you hit it, meaning that you’ve now added your name to the wall of guys that already hit it. It’s like a club.. “You got that? Yeah.. I got that last weekend. Did she do that trick where she…”

Making Love makes no sense at all. It’s a good term to use if you want to get a prudish chick to give it up, but other than that, it really has nothing to do with the actual act you’re about to do to / with her. The only possible sense it makes is that she doesn’t love you BEFORE you hit it, but she falls in love with you right after she gets hers.

~ Bill Cammack

Normal Relationships & Labels

Bill Cammack — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 11:31:14 +0000

I’m not a fan of labeling relationships because the label doesn’t indicate or describe the functionality of the relationship. Similarly, the LACK of a label doesn’t indicate a lack of functionality between individuals. Therefore, the label itself is almost entirely useless.

I was watching this movie the other day, and this guy’s trying to get to know this new chick. He explains something about himself to her and she says “Oh.. You’re one of those [X] guys”. His response is “I don’t really, uh, subscribe to any label”.

When I heard that, I realized that that’s what I should have been saying all along. I mean, I’ve BEEN saying that forever, but I haven’t stressed it enough, since I’ve been attempting to inform the average Joe/Josephine about what my life is like. It’s just not as easy as I thought it would be. Things that make perfect sense to me don’t make sense to other people. Things that work for me don’t work for other people. I’ve attempted to explain something that I’ve now decided I just can’t explain. I just have to be thankful for the situation and keep it movin’. :D

Labels

Labels are only as relevant as the people that are willing to adhere to them.. meaning that basically, they’re completely useless.

Let’s examine the term “Girlfriend”, which, to me, means “The chick you’re most likely to have sex with today”. What does that term define, really? What does it rule IN, and what does it rule OUT? Nothing.

Every single day, you can read about guys that are really nice to their girlfriends and guys that are really horrible towards them. That means that the label “Girlfriend” doesn’t come automatically equipped with decent behavior from the boyfriend. What’s THAT worth? There are guys that are faithful to their girlfriends and guys that have several girlfriends at the same time… The point being that applying a label to a situation doesn’t have any bearing on what actually happens between those two (or more) people.

Polyamory

In my attempt to describe my non-average life to the average person, I’ve described myself as polyamorous in the past. At this point, I realize that the term has been co-opted to stand for a particular segment of society that engages in regular “relationships” with multiple people, simultaneously. That’s completely not what I meant or subscribe to. It’s kind of like how the original Punk Rockers played, loved and listened to Punk Rock because that’s how they felt and how they lived. Eventually, people started loving what the originals loved and produced and started emulating their heroes, especially dressing like them. Next thing you know, anyone who dresses the same way is considered a Punk Rocker, regardless of whether they ROCK or not. :/ Anyone who styles their hair a certain way is considered “Emo”. It’s a haircut, people… a haircut. It’s absolutely meaningless.

The strict breakdown of the term Polyamory is from Greek πολυ [poly, meaning many or several] and Latin amor [love]. All it actually means is to love many people. Period. Unfortunately, somehow, “relationships” became equated with loving someone, which is absolutely retarded. There are lots of people in relationships that don’t love each other and lots of people that love each other that aren’t in relationships with each other. Love is a feeling. Some would argue that it’s a chemical reaction. You feel it or you don’t. You feel it for nobody, one person or many people. You feel it for one person at a time or many people simultaneously.

So, this very basic and understandable term has been co-opted to mean people that are in several simultaneous open relationships. I realized this when I saw a show about it recently. This chick was dating this chick that was dating a dude. In order to explain this mess, I’ll label the original couple [A]. Chick[A] was dating Dude[A] and then Chick[A] started dating Chick[B]. Meanwhile, Chick[B] was NOT dating Dude[A], so it looked like this:

Chick[B]<->Chick[A]<->Dude[A]

What woke me up was when Chick[B] decided that she wanted to go out with Dude[B]. Instead of doing what she wanted to do, because it’s her life… she decided to consult with Chick[A] as far as WHAT. SHE. THOUGHT. about Chick[B] potentially dating Dude[B]. This is when I did at least a triple-take and was like “um… This is retarded. How are you going to ASK anyone that’s not your parents whether you can go out with someone you like or not?”. This is in fact LESS FREE than a regular “relationship”, because NOW, you have not ONE but TWO people that might veto your involvement with someone that you’re naturally attracted to.

Cost of Living

Unfortunately, this is the price you have to pay to be involved in so-called “deviant lifestyles”. The pool of people that you’re sexually compatible with is a rather small subset of the general population. Your choices are to get down with whatever rules the other person lays down for being involved with them or not to be involved with them at all. They know what they want and what they don’t. If you can’t get down with the program, you’re useless to them anyway, so there’s no point in being involved with you past friendship.. IF that.

So Chick[B] had a sit-down with Chick[A] and basically asked her permission to go out on a date with Dude[B]. Chick[A] looked actually hurt about it. I suppose some people like to feel like they’re so special that they can have multiple GFs/BFs and all of their SOs are only interested in them. haha Right! :D … So Chick[A] sanctioned the date between Chick[B] and Dude[B] *IF* Dude[B] was brought to the crib to meet Chick[A] before the date! HAHAHAHA Incredible.

Anyway, you get the picture. This situation was a complete mess. It’s indicative, however, of what labels get you. Once you subscribe to a label, people treat you as if that label means something, when it actually means nothing. In actual fact, Chick[B] could have dated or messed with Dude[B] anytime she wanted to, and it’s none of Chick[A]’s business at all. The only reason any of this happened is that Chick[B] bought into Chick[A]’s game of “I own several people”, when in fact, Chick[A] owns ZERO people…. Lincoln freed the slaves.

Viewing the situation from Chick[A]’s point of view, you only have as much power as other people give you. If someone decides to opt-out of your lifestyle, you’re short. There’s nothing you can do about it. They’re just not interested, so you’re left with your remaining roster of GFs/BFs. That’s the way it works.. People come and go. Society in general subscribes to “one guy, one girl”. If that’s not what you’re offering, it’s a tough row to hoe. It’s not for the faint of heart. Some people catch feelings about stuff like this, which I think is really funny/pathetic. It’s all in the game. If you’re not offering what someone’s brainwashed to want for themselves, they’re going to eventually select someone that’s at least willing to CLAIM to want to be involved in the type of relationship they’re looking for.

Reality

I don’t know what happened in that situation because it was too boring to continue watching. I figure that at some point, Chick[B] would have figured out that it’s her life and it’s the only one she’s ever going to have, so she may as well do what she wants to do when she wants to do it. It’s not going to serve her in the future if she declines to mess with Dude[B] because Chick[A] caught feelin’s about it.

The fact of the matter is that people like what they like, feel what they feel and do what they do. It’s really not any more complicated than that. There’s no label that can actually describe one person’s relationship to another person. Every relationship is unique because it involves two unique individuals. Regardless of whether someone dresses like a Punk Rock or cuts their hair in an Emo style, you can’t expect them to act or react in an uniform fashion with everyone else that tries to look or act like them.

Unfortunately, without the trial & error of becoming intimately involved with A LOT OF PEOPLE, this ‘trend of uniqueness’ isn’t going to be apparent. According to the media, there are NORMAL PEOPLE and then everyone else. As long as you subscribe to what they’re telling you everyone else subscribes to, you’re seen as NORMAL as well, and you get to stay in the game. Once you deviate from that, people start murmuring on the back-channel unless you’re a celebrity, in which case they murmur in the tabloids.

Do you like to screw chicks other than your wife? Well then… You’re a sex addict, aren’t you? :D .. Of course you are. You should be in rehab.

Did you “cheat” on a chick that’s considered one of the most beautiful and sought-after women in the world? There must be something WRONG with you, then! :D Make sure your publicist apologizes for you and get better at doing your ‘dirt’ on the sneaks.

Did you spend over $50,000 on prostitutes from just ONE madam? hahaha REHAB!!! You’re SICK! :D … I hope you get to say “Hello” to the thousands upon thousands of guys that should be in rehab WITH YOU for spending thousands of dollars each year buying drinks for girls they’re not even guaranteed to have sex with! :D

Did you spend $4,000 hiring JUST ONE PROSTITUTE and importing her from one state to another, even though you’re known for busting up prostitution rings? :D ..…..

Do you like to figure out fancy things to do with cigars and female interns during telephone business meetings? :D …. Which reminds me. I believe I’m going to need an intern soon.

I mean, seriously.. The list goes on forever and ever of people that got caught doing what they hid FROM YOU so that they could appear “normal”. Up until the time these people were found out, everybody was like “Oh! Look at the shining examples of upstanding citizens! :D”.. Immediately afterwards, everybody goes “Oh! They’re Not NORMAL!!! :O”. Actually, yes… Yes, they ARE normal. They’re all doing what makes them happy. This is what people do.

They like to hide, because a) it’s none of your business, and b) they don’t feel like being talked down about in the tabloids, but you can’t stop the bum rush. They’re going to do what they want to do with whomever they want to do it because that’s what makes their life worth living. If you don’t like it, you can go take a long walk on a short plank. Hit the bricks. Kick Rocks.

“Rubber”.. Meet “Road”

For the most part, people are willing to overlook aspects of a relationship that they don’t like in order to receive the benefits of being with that particular person. This works well with the current system because people like to advertise the positive points of being with them and deemphasize if not completely OMIT the negative points. That’s all well and good until someone gets found out…

A chick might say that she’s completely down with giving a guy as much sex as he wants in order for him to be her boyfriend… but omit the fact that she’s also willing to give it up to several guys in a bathroom stall while they videotape it, until the time she gets caught and needs to make up an excuse.

A politician might say he’s faithful to his wife, until the time he gets caught and then she has to do the Perp Walk with him while he pretends to act sorry for the cameras and read the statement that his publicist wrote about how badly he feels for his family and the people who elected him.

A guy might be lovey-dovey to his girlfriend, until the time she gets nosey in his business and he kicks her ass in a Lamborghini on Grammy night.

A chick might claim to be this 14-year-old boy’s teacher, until it turns out she’s also his girlfriend and she’s pregnant by him.

A guy might insist that he never had sex with That Woman, until his semen shows up on the dress she wore to work that day.

A married guy might go to jail for defrauding rich people, AND THEN a chick might write a book about how she’s been carrying on a 20-year affair with him behind his wife’s back…. How come she didn’t write it BEFORE he became a pariah? :D

See what I mean? All these people have all the labels and none of them are worth JACK!… NOTHING! Boyfriend, Girlfriend, Husband, Wife, Teacher, Student, Investor, Actor, Singer, Politician.. ALL completely useless when it comes to describing and/or defining the relationship between people. It all comes down to the character of the individuals involved.

This is why I don’t bother playing the label game with people. It’s meaningless and it’s a waste of my time and brain processing cycles.

I never ask people about their so-called “relationship status”, but I’ll listen if they feel like telling me about it. If they tell me about it, I accept it as a possibility, but not as truth. I’m totally disinterested in who people say they are and COMPLETELY INTERESTED in what they actually DO.

Also.. The examples I gave above are *only* the headlines that hit the papers / internet. This type of stuff goes on every. single. day. in average people’s lives and they sweep it under the rug so they can look “normal” to everyone else that’s putting up the exact same front.

Does this happen to everyone? Of course not. Does it happen to A LOT of people? Yup! Does it happen to a lot of people that DON’T KNOW it’s happening to them? Yup! :D

If you’re lucky, YOU’RE a nice person, you MEET a nice person that wants to be nice TO YOU and y’all live happily ever after. Sweet! More power to ya! :D

Hopefully, the other person’s idiosyncrasies stay under their hats… If they happen to slip out, hopefully you can deal with them and still want to be in a relationship with them. If you’re really lucky, you’ll consider the revelations delightfully kinky and take your relationship in an entirely new direction! ;)

~ Bill Cammack

NYTVF: The Web Series Producers Guide

Bill Cammack — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:58:08 +0000

Last year, I was invited to speak @ the 2008 NYTVF (New York Television Festival).

Here’s the video of the entire panel discussion. My section begins @ 2:40.

The Web Series Producers Guide produced by Phil Thomas Di Giulio on WellcomeMat

This panel, featured distinguished content creators and arbiters offering audiences a primer on the best approaches to producing your Web series. Should you produce it yourself or wait for production money? How long should the show be, and how frequently should it appear? Do you syndicate, or offer it exclusively. Lastly, how do you get people to watch it? Panelists: * Paul Kontonis (Moderator) – CEO, For Your Imagination * Bill Cammack – Video Editor and Consultant * Kirby Ferguson – Writer/Director/Producer, GoodieBag.tv * Marc Hustvedt – Editor-in-Chief, Tubefilter News * Brett Wilson – Co-founder and CEO, TubeMogul

Why Women Go To The Bathroom Together

Bill Cammack — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:44:47 +0000

From time immemorial, guys have wondered why women go to the bathroom together. Well… The Kid’s about to let you know what the real deal is! :D

Here are five reasons why women go to the bathroom together:

1. Cockblocking

If there’s one thing women love, it’s NOT MINDING their own business. The only thing they love more than that is stopping YOU from getting laid. It’s one of the two things they do to guys that make them feel accomplished in life….

If you’re talking to a gal and her homegirl comes over uninvited, she’s trying to block ONE OF YOU. There’s a very, very, very, VERY low-percentage chance that she’s trying to steal you from her girlfriend. I’ve had this happen, and most of the time it’s been because the blocker considered herself as trumping the blockee in looks or sexuality. It’s basically “If SHE can get the rap to him, I know that *I* can get him too / instead”. It’s flattering and all that, but it’s also corny. Just be happy for your girl and stay out of her business. Stop being greedy & competitive.

There’s an even LOWER PERCENTAGE CHANCE that that’s how she and her girlfriend roll… Like, they do everything together.. Like, EVERYTHING! ;) I’ve had this happen as well, and the difference is that there’s a comfort level in their interaction with you. When the new chick arrives, it’s like nothing’s different. The original chick is just as comfortable around you and just as authentic with her girl right there. The new chick’s vibe is one of assisting her girl, not competing with or blocking her. It’s like a package deal.. If you want one, you get the other by default.. or at least she’ll be in the same room, watching. :D

99.987% of the time, you don’t have to worry about this, though. :D The reason the chick came over was to “save” her girlfriend from YOU. This normally doesn’t have anything to do with you, but rather that chicks that get caught giving it up like to blame the guy for leading her astray, and then they make deals with each other to stop each other from giving it up when they go out partying.

So, regardless of whether you’re telling her how to do better in her Google SERP rankings or you’re telling her what you want to do to her when you get her alone, her homegirl is going to interrupt her merely because she sees her talking alone with a guy. Don’t take it personally. It’s all in the game. This is why you have to kick your game quickly and not lay back in the cut like as if you’re going to have all evening to chat this chick up. If you want her number, get it up front. If you want her Social Media contact information, get it up front. Every minute you delay, you’re increasing the chances that her no-rap-getting homegirl is going to wonder where her girl is and insert herself into her business.

Anyway, if this chick comes over and makes herself the third wheel, check her body positioning. Normally, if she’s up to no good, her shoulder will be facing you and her body will be facing her homegirl. She’s not there to talk to both of you but to talk to her girl in front of you. Keep an eye on her eyes. She’s going to be trying to communicate to her girl that she wants her to leave with her. In rare cases, a chick will just come over and physically remove her girlfriend from your conversation by grabbing her arm and pulling her ANYWHERE where you’re not located. This is rude as hell, but it happens. \o/

If she’s not that bold, she’s going to suggest that they go to the bathroom together. This is an extremely suspicious move if the establishment you’re in has unisex, single-stall bathrooms. It’s even more suspicious if there’s obviously no line for the bathroom, so the third-wheel-chick should just go to the bathroom by herself, since nobody invited her into your conversation in the first place.

So then, she suggests that her girl goes with her. You shouldn’t care about this, because you should have procured contact information ASAP, so who cares where she goes? You’ll call/text/email/DM her later or tomorrow. If you got caught slippin’, you might be short and you just lost one to the game. After the question is asked, check the eyes of the chick you were kicking’ it to. She’s either going to look like “Damn… She messed up my rap to this guy” or she’s going to look like “YEAH! THANKS, FRIEND!!! :D THANKS FOR SAVING ME FROM THIS GUY!” and she’ll eagerly excuse herself and head to the bathroom with her girl.

If she’s a CRUMB, she’ll say she’s coming back and then she won’t. If she’s respectable, she’ll inform you that she’s leaving and not coming back. If she’s interested in you, she’ll go with her girl and then come to find you either where she left you or wherever you migrated to after she walked away.

2. Doing Drugs

Since there’s a stigma against drug addicts, girls like to do their drugs privately. This is similar to how “Easy” chicks like to give it up on the DL so they can act like they’re not having sex with random dudes that they meet on the fly.

When a chick tells you she’s going to the bathroom with another chick, make sure you look her square in the eyes. Do it again when (IF) she comes back. If she used the bathroom, she’s going to be approximately as coherent/incoherent as she was when she left. If she comes back giddy and unable to focus, she was doing something she’s not supposed to be doing. Get Rid Of Her, IMMEDIATELY.

First of all.. You don’t want to accidentally have any kids with this chick that are going to be drug-addicted fresh out the box. Do yourself a favor and pull girls that don’t need to get high to have a good time.

Second, and most importantly.. You don’t want this chick to retardedly start a beef that you’re going to be expected to handle or even lift a finger to deal with. Chicks are souped up enough when they’re sober. You REALLY don’t want to be responsible for them when they’re wildin’ out. Get. Rid. Of. Her.

3. Talking About Boys

The old “Going to powder our noses” excuse has historically been a mainstay amongst women so that they can extract themselves from a situation and talk about the guy(s) that they’ve been hanging out with. This normally happens when you’re socializing with both women, not when the other one shows up uninvited. Basically, there’s something that the third wheel wants to say to her girl or ask her that she doesn’t want you to be aware of.

As long as you’ve been on-point with your game, you have nothing to worry about. They’re going to talk and giggle about you for a few minutes and then come back for more.

The air before this happens is going to be mutual fun and respect between all three of you. Once you get used to it, you can tell whether a chick’s trying to undermine your rap or socialize in a friendly fashion. These breaks are actually useful for you, because you get to check for text messages from other chicks that you intelligently ignored by putting your phone on vibrate, and figuring out where your other homegirls are on foursquare, in case the chicks in the current location don’t pan out.

Now that I’m thinking about this subject, I’m going to start preempting these situations. Every time a chick comes over uninvited, I’m going to ask the chick I was already talking to to come to the bathroom WITH ME!!! :D… well… assuming that the third wheel isn’t HAWTER than the one I was already talking to! ;)

4. Escaping Without Taking Responsibility

Sometimes, the chick you were already talking to will suggest to the third wheel that they hit the bathroom together. There could be several reasons for this, including that she actually has to use the bathroom and that there actually is a long line for the ladies’ room and she doesn’t want to be lonely while she’s waiting or that she wants to ask her girlfriend what she thinks about you. You’ll never really know until she returns, or doesn’t. It could also be that she’s smart enough not to trust her girlfriend around a guy she likes, and needs to get HER away from YOU….

If she doesn’t excuse herself with some form of “I’m not coming back” statement, she very well may be using the bathroom as an excuse to eject from your conversation without owning her actions. Actually, she doesn’t even need for her girl to have interrupted your conversation for that. She’ll just announce that she’s going to the bathroom, and the next thing you know, she’s in some conversation in another part of the establishment as if you never existed and she hadn’t been speaking to you before she left.

To be fair, guys do this also. When new chicks arrive somewhere who are more attractive than the gal he’s currently kicking’ it with, a guy’s liable to bail from a situation in order to pursue what he (currently) *really* wants. The good old “My phone is on vibrator” trick works really well for this when you fake receiving a call and tell the chick it’s too loud in here and need to go outside to take this call.

No matter who’s doing it, this behavior is corny & discourteous if you’re planning to remain inside the establishment where you were speaking to the other person. All you’re doing is letting them know that as soon as you perceive a situation to be “tough”, you’re going to lie about it instead of come straight up with the truth. At least, if you’ve got to lie to get out of a conversation, add the fact that you’re ending THIS conversation to the lie. “Hey. It was nice talking to you, but I’ve got to go find my (non-existent) friends that I’ve been ignoring for the last 30 minutes that I’ve been kickin’ it with you. Google Me. Peace.”

Anyway, if a chick uses the old “I’m going to the bathroom” escape trick on you, she’s clearly willing to omit the truth or bend it so she doesn’t have to own what she’s really thinking or what she really wants to do. If you just met her, you might decide to let that slide, since women get hit on every day by men and there’s nothing differentiating you from her other stalkers until y’all get to know each other.

If you’ve already spent some time with her or you’ve been introduced by mutual friends and she pulls this, you might consider erasing her information if you got it before she left. In this age of Social Media, it’s increasingly easy for people’s “behind closed doors” behavior to accidentally see the light of day through pictures & videos that weren’t shot by either one of you.

If that happens, you want her to be the type of chick to go “Yeah. I did it. Mind your business.” and not “OH MY GOD!.. IT’S HIS FAULT!” when it was either her idea or a mutual decision made between consenting adults. If she can’t / won’t take responsibility for not wanting to talk to you anymore at a social function, don’t expect her to be a stand-up person when it REALLY COUNTS either.

5. They’re Lesbians

Sweet! The More, The Merrier! :D

~ Bill Cammack

Frenemies or Frienemies

Bill Cammack — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:33:43 +0000

Bill & Flo

A while back, my friend Flo typed either “Frenemies” or “Frienemies” to me in a conversation and I was like “um.. What’s that?”. Once she explained it to me, as a combination of the words Friend and Enemy, I was like :/

As corny as the term is, it really DOES accurately describe the relationship that many people have with other people. According to Wikipedia:

“Frenemy” (sometimes spelled “frienemy”) is a portmanteau of “friend” and “enemy” which can refer to either an enemy disguised as a friend or to a partner who is simultaneously a competitor.[1] The latter can describe personal, geopolitical, and commercial relationships both among individuals and groups or institutions. The word may have appeared in print as early as 1953.[2]

Before I got involved with Social Media, most people that I knew don’t have time or energy for this type of relationship. They also weren’t interested in it. We were on the same team or we weren’t. We felt positively, neutrally or negatively about each other or we don’t know or care that each other exists.

There are, apparently, some people that either enjoy living this kind of life or find it to be necessary because of what they do to get money. An example would be the film industry. Everybody wants to be selected to act in something, or direct something, or film something, or work on the crew. What’chagonnado when someone tells you they got a job YOU wanted? You can either congratulate them and sulk behind their backs (if that’s how you feel), or you can tell them how you really feel and risk alienating them.

The Tabloids

Going the direct route doesn’t work so well in Social Media. People aren’t so quick to tell people with 40,000 Twitter Followers what they really think of them. So, bedsides IRL pressures, there are online pressures not to make yourself a pariah on the back-channel.

Jill & Flo

The back-channel is where authentic conversation goes on between people that know each other online, except it’s private. It’s where true opinions of people are passed around and propagated, which never end up “in print”.

You can’t find these opinions on Twitter or Facebook or in blog comments, but they’re commonly-known positions and a lot of people have discussed them and agree with them. As a video game player, I find it quite interesting to go to parties and see the different factions hanging out together, commiserating about the other team(s).

I’ve also been the victim of ‘guilt by association’, where people know that I’m friends with someone they don’t like and automatically place me on the opposite team, when, in fact, I’m absolutely neutral, and the issues they have with each other have nothing to do with me, whatsoever.

Usually, I don’t say anything about this and just let it slide. When you know a bunch of people, there’s always going to be someone that has a problem with someone else that you know. Trying to be involved is like keeping several plates spinning on several sticks… You’ll never finish maintaining the situation, there’s no value to it, and in the end you’ll have wasted a bunch of time.

One time, I decided to get involved. I have a friend that I was a fan of way before we became IRL friends. At some point, I felt that she had become “meh” towards me, which is perfectly fine… ish happens. I can’t possibly count the number of people that I used to hang out with throughout the years that I’ve lost contact with. The issue was that due to the fact that we have a bunch of mutual friends and see each other on the circuit now and then, I wasn’t sure she’d tell me if I had been annoying her or she just wasn’t interested in socializing with me.

Instead of jumping to conclusions, I decided to ask her directly whether we were cool or not. She was like “yeah.”, naturally, hahaha what else is someone going to say to a question like that? :D I explained my position to her, that I don’t do the Frenemies thing and it was cool with me if she didn’t want to socialize. She insisted she didn’t have a problem with me, so I accepted that and that was the end of it.

Fear & Loathing

People in general have become scared to death of voicing their opinions about personality conflicts. Back in the day, when there was no such thing as Social Media, there were people that liked each other, people that disliked each other and people that didn’t care about each other or know each other existed. The system works very well that way. Everyone knows where everyone stands. You know which crowds not to mix when you’re planning events. You know which people not to recommend to work together on business projects.

I wrote this article weeks ago, and since then, we’ve seen the perfect example of what happens to you when you say what you REALLY think about people. Some guy decided he was going to shout “YOU LIE” at The President of The United States of America while he was trying to speak. There was an IMMEDIATE verbal reaction from a lot of people in the crowd. According to Keith Olbermann’s comments about the situation, the guy wasn’t even RIGHT about what he was screaming about, on top of being rude and disrespectful to President Obama as a person and to the office of the POTUS as well.

Regardless of how many people agree with what the guy said, HE was the one that interrupted The President, so he gets to be the poster-boy for the situation. This is what people attempt to avoid by keeping their opinions flowing on the back-channel and not airing them in blogs or in audio or video clips where people are going to share the media with everyone they know. This is what I call a transparency loop, or probably more accurately, a transparency SPIRAL, because the more people you know, the more people you have an opportunity to offend with your media and the less honest you’re willing to be when you’re creating media. Everyone loves to claim that they’re transparent, but in fact, they’re 100% transparent about whatever way-smaller-percentage of the facts they’re willing to talk about.

Anyway, politics is an excellent example of frenemies, because people have to pretend they like and respect each other in order to come to agreements about policies. Meanwhile, every time it’s time for someone to get elected, they come up with all kinds of GARBAGE to talk about the other candidate. Then, when it’s all over and somebody won, people want to act like “heh heh… Nah man… That was all business, heh heh. We’re COOL! We’re COOL!” :/

Keeping Up Appearances

The problem with Frenemies is that everyone appears to be friends.. at least to those people that aren’t connected on the back-channel and don’t know the actual scoop about what person X and person Y have been saying about each other.

This means that it’s really tough to tell who’s serious and who isn’t about being someone important in your life. The people who are trying to USE YOU act exactly the same way as your actual friends. On top of that, when people know who you know, they try their best not to speak honestly about you when any of those people are present, which leads to even more dilution.

I liked the good old days… Agree, Disagree or Agree To Disagree. Period. If you have a beef… Settle it… Or Don’t. Make the teams. Decide which team you’re on or decide to remain a free agent. Some people are going to hate you for choosing sides. Other people are going to hate you for NOT choosing sides. There’s nothing you can do about this.

It’s a much easier life and you can socialize and do business way more efficiently when you have friends, enemies and people that don’t care about you one way or the other instead of a bunch of people that you just can’t figure out who the hell they are or what the hell they want.

~ Bill Cammack

How To Clown Yourself

Bill Cammack — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 19:36:43 +0000

Make no mistake. This is not a post about how to CLONE yourself, but rather how to CLOWN yourself. Some guy caught feelin’s over what President Obama said in a speech the other night and screamed out “YOU LIE” while the President of The United States Of America was speaking. hahahahaha um… WHAT? hahahahahaha :D

Here’s the video clip. Dude flips out at 1:28…

Now.. The Kid don’t care about politics AT. ALL. Not AT ALL! :D However, are several lessons to be learned here.

Hold Your Head

First of all, what you want to do in any situation, especially a situation where you’re in public, especially a situation when you’re around people you do business with, especially in a situation where you’re around your superiors, especially when you were PRIVILEGED enough to be sitting in the same room with the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, hahaha you don’t want to forget who you are and what your station is in life.

If you’re a member of the House of Representatives and the President is talking, STFU.

If you’re a Private in the armed forces, and a General is talking, STFU.

If you’re an employee and the CEO is talking, STFU.

This is known as RESPECT. If people begin to believe that you don’t know how to respect your superiors, you will be shunned. Beleedat. Your superiors will see you as an insubordinate. Your peers will see you as a liability. Nobody wants to be the man next to the man that can’t control himself. Nobody wants to suffer guilt by association.

If you were selected for or elected to a position of privilege, it’s because people believed that you could handle the pressure. People believed that you could do the business without becoming so emotionally wrapped up in the situation that you lose your cool and make your whole team look like JERKS. If you let it slip that you aren’t able to handle that responsibility, you will receive Das Boot… Quick, Fast, In A Hurry, Flava’s Vision Ain’t Blurry.

Mob Mentality

Also, don’t play yourself by aligning yourself with people that will murmur when they’re in a crowd of murmurers, but will STFU when it comes to individually expressing their opinions. There’s nothing wrong with (or illegal about) thinking that the POTUS is lying to you. There’s something wrong with you running your mouth when nobody offered you a chance to speak. There’s something wrong with you challenging someone you don’t have the authority or rank to challenge. Regardless of how many people agree with what you said, they STILL wouldn’t have done what you did. To them, that’s what separates them from the savages and you just marked yourself as a savage.

A lot of people go out like suckers in this fashion. They feel like because everyone else is hooting and hollering and saying stuff under their breaths that they wouldn’t dare say out loud, in public, in a business environment, in the presence of their superiors and ON VIDEOTAPE, SO THE WORLD CAN CHECK IT OUT ON YOUTUBE that if they scream out something that they know that they and their team believe that their team is going to back their play.

Nope.

Your team will back your play as long as you play your position. If you’re a benchwarmer, you don’t get to substitute yourself into the game for the star running back. You don’t get to request the ball for the last shot instead of Michael Jordan. You don’t get to tell Tiger Woods how he should putt. You get to STFU and be happy that people think you’re up to the challenge of being in the game without being the best player. If you want to scream on people, get elected President so EVERYBODY ELSE needs to STFU when YOU’RE speaking.

Damage Control

Next thing you know, your boys give you a SHELLACKING for making them look uncivilized. That’s the point here. It’s not that they disagree with you.. It’s that you expressed yourself like a savage and made EVERYONE ON YOUR TEAM look bad so they send you out to the reporters so you can fall on your sword with some statement like:

“Well, I, uh… Last night, uh, heard from the leadership that they, uh, wanted me to contact The White House, uh, and state that, UHHHHHHH, my, uh, statements, uh, were inappropriate. I did. I’m very grateful, uh, that The White House, in talking with them, uh, they indicated that, uh, they appreciated the call, and that we needed to have a civil discussion about the Health Care issues, and I certainly agree with that.”

UMMMMM…. NO. #*$&%^@. DUH! Are you kidding me? What?… NOW, you feel like you agree that you need to have a civil discussion instead of BLURTING OUT HOW YOU FEEL when The President of the United States of America is speaking? :D HAHAHAHAHA oh. nice.

This is known as Damage Control. You’ve already made yourself a laughing stock and a poster boy for your entire team. You’re like that chick that gave it up and then fell in love when the dude was on to the next chick already and forgot what your name is… IF he had ever asked you in the first place. Discretion is the better part of valor. There’s a reason why these pundits go on television and disagree with each other and make sure they show a big toothy grin when they’re finished. It’s all part of the game. The reason you made it to the position you made it to was because people felt like you understood the game and could handle it. NOW, your job is going to be HANDLING taking all the blame yourself so the rest of your team can try to play you off like keyboard cat.

Insult To Injury

Next, you get to look like even MORE OF A CHUMP when the guy you interrupted with your outburst calmly, rationally and intelligently accepts your apology:

See what happened to you? He didn’t even need to address what you said. Now you look small, and it sounds like you FEEL small by the way your voice was cracking when you were trying to memorize and regurgitate that fake apology like Chris Brown.

Nobody wants to hear about “The Heat Of The Moment”. Nobody wants to hear that you were acting spontaneously. You are not a freestyle rapper. You don’t get your money from record labels. You get your money for ACTING CIVILLY and FOLLOWING THE RULES. If you can’t do that, someone else will be sitting in your seat after the next election/selection period.

The Point

The point is that once you achieve a certain level in society or business, you can’t afford to act “common”. You can’t afford to throw popcorn at the television. You can’t afford to throw shoes at Presidents. You can’t afford to get caught up in your emotions when you’re supposed to be sitting still and SHUTTING THE %&$^ UP when your superior is speaking.

If you can’t follow the rules, you get demoted or ejected. There are lots of avenues available to you to express your opinion in a civil fashion. It’s not like this is your ONE CHANCE TO SPEAK, when you’re sitting in a crowd of hundreds of people that are following the rules. It’s bad enough when the General asks for a volunteer and you don’t step forward but everyone else steps back so you get caught out there. It’s even worse when you call attention to yourself, not for your beliefs but for the fact that you weren’t able to control yourself, which makes you look bad, makes your teammate next to you look bad, and makes YOUR SUPERIORS on your team look bad when they’re trying everything they can to make it look like they deserve to sit at the grown-ups table instead of the kiddie table.

Play your position and your team will back your play. Strike out going for a Home Run when they told you to Bunt, and you’re going to find yourself on the bench, traded to another Major League team or demoted to the minors.

~ Bill Cammack

*EDIT*: It turns out that Keith Olbermann finished this same guy off with a 36-hit combo. WoW! :D

Ladies: How To Get To Know Your Boyfriend

Bill Cammack — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:55:27 +0000

Ladies!!! You need to stop relying on so-called Women’s Intuition to tell you what your boyfriend thinks about you. You’re going to have to take a proactive stance and figure these things out for yourself.

The best way to do this is to have an honest conversation with him about “Where is this relationship going?”, yadda yadda. If he won’t agree to this, you’re going to need to employ some underhanded methods to get the truth so you know whether you should stick with this guy or move on.

Here are some tips on how to make that happen! ;)

Play Video Games With Him

It’s easy for your boyfriend to be civil towards you while you’re out to dinner or watching a movie. That’s because you’re not doing anything important. Your job is to look good and be sexy. It’s hard to screw that up if you happen to look good and you happen to be sexy.

Now.. If you fail to meet him at the teleporter and shoot the guys that are trying to stop him from capturing the flag, you’re going to find out what he really thinks about you. If you fail to deliver that smoke grenade on-point and he gets shot while trying to secure the base, you’re gonna get screamed on. If you go 0-12 in the deathmatch and y’all’s team loses by 11 points, you might not be getting laid tonight.

Get Him Drunk

It’s easy for your man to play it off that he’s only kicking’ it with you while he’s sober. Take him to the bar/club and get a few dozen drinks in him and see how he acts. If he elbows you, points somewhere and goes “Damn Sunn… Check out that #&$^%’s ass over there! :O”, the memory of your relationship didn’t survive his current state of inebriation.

He should also start talking about things you’ve never heard from him before, such as how hawt your sister is and how you should invite her over some evening soon for the usual festivities.

*NOTE*: Let HIM do all the talking when he’s drunk. Do NOT take this opportunity to try out stuff like telling him you’re giving it up to some other dude. This could cause his “Talk Yang to people you don’t know and have never met over the internet or a video game” mentality to write some IRL checks that his ass can’t cash, leading to your boyfriend receiving what Eddie Murphy would describe as CONSEQUENCES & REPERCUSSIONS! :D

Tell Him You Want To Meet His Parents

This should result in him saying “For What?” before he remembers that he told you that y’all were in a serious relationship. Guys usually aren’t thinking about this, since they only told you that to get you to lay down. Coming out of the blue with something like that or “Let’s move in together” should shock him into a temporarily honest state where the look on his face says “What THE %&@ is she TALKING ABOUT?”, which will let you know that you’re not Ms Right, but rather Ms Right Now.

Tell Him You’re Not Going To Have Sex With Him Ever Again

This should result in you getting immediately dumped.

If it doesn’t, he might actually like you as a person. If he looks hurt and wants to work it out, you know that he was enjoying something about you other than getting on. If he seems to be mentally processing information, he’s going through his rolodex of numbers to figure out who’s going to replace you in the #1 slot.

This might not work for you if a) you’re already known to be a liar, so your word means nothing anyway, or b) he already knows that you’re sprIZung on the dILZNick and you’re never going to stop giving him some regardless of what you say.

Tell Him You’re Pregnant

Besides causing him to immediately stop breathing… This statement should induce obvious physiological changes in his skin tone. If his skin is brown and it turns white, you have a problem. If his skin is white and it turns “I live in Ireland and it’s always cloudy here so my skin and the skin of my ancestors has never seen the sun” white, you have a problem.

Try this while he’s already sitting, in case he faints.

If his first question is “How?”, he’s in shock and never ever considered the prospect of getting you pregnant, since he was having sex with you for fun and/or recreation. If his first question is “Whose is it?”, he thinks you’re a ho. If he doesn’t ask you any questions at all, bring him a glass of water, smelling salts, or call the paramedics.

~ Bill Cammack

How Social Media Works

Bill Cammack — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 11:27:55 +0000

The other night, I realized that someone I was aware of via Social Media was going to be at an event I had planned to attend, so I sent her a “Friends Request”.

The last I had paid attention to her online presence, she was living in California, so I figured this was my opportunity to meet her and tell her I enjoyed her work (on-air talent / hostess / reporter) before she flew away again.

So I’m at this event, and someone I don’t recognize walks up to me and says “Hi. You friended me today! :D”. Looking more closely, I realized who she was, greeted her and we started chatting.

Come to find out that a) she’s moved here to NYC, and b) I thought she was “only” on-air talent, but she’s actually a producer, a complimentary position to mine as a video editor.

Her Side

So, what happened here?… Because she was doing what she does naturally, I became aware of her as online talent and someone who’s connected, however vaguely, to what I do as a hobby as well as for work. Personally, I like to give credit where credit’s due, and I’m actually a FAN of very many of my friends who do what we do. So, I was glad to meet her AT ALL. Next, she had a friendly disposition. There are lots of people who are good in front of the camera and horrible in f2f conversation. Third, she was now a New Yorker, which is like when a player gets traded to your home team… you’re suddenly MORE INTERESTED in her career, etc. Fourth, I find out that professionally, we’re in the same field as well as having mutual friends via Social Media that can vouch for her professional talents (or lack thereof!) as well as what kind of person she is, socially.

Therefore, having chatted with her in person for approximately 20 minutes on one day out of my entire life.. Combining that with her “online resume” and the relationships / social capital she’s built via Social Media gives me a very well rounded concept of who she is, what she’s about and where I can immediately get more information if I need it. All of a sudden, I’m much more likely to recommend her to someone who’s looking for a producer on a project. So, while she hasn’t directly monetized her Social Media, meaning I didn’t click on any ads on her site and I didn’t buy any goods or services from her, she’s converted her social capital into professional recognition plus a positive social experience.

My Side

Looking at it from the other angle… Because I’m interested in online video, I became aware of her and a fan of hers. Because I socialize via SM, I found out that she was on the list for a party I was planning to attend, so I “Friended” her. Without those two, I would have been at the same party with her, but wouldn’t have met her. Generally, when I go to crowded events, there are lots of women I don’t meet. There are actually lots of women I don’t even SEE, because I probably know between 20-60 people in that location and never stop interacting with them.

From my conversation with her, I found out even more things I have in common with her socially and professionally, so I also achieved what I’ll call an accidental conversion. I didn’t go to the party to meet a producer that might need an editor for projects, but that’s what happened. I didn’t give her a business card, but I didn’t need to because we’re already connected via Social Media. I don’t carry cards anyway. If people don’t know how to Google “Bill”, I really can’t see what kind of business relationship we could possibly have. :D

Your Side

This is why I was saying I’m a special case when it comes to this. What I do is NECESSARY in the realm of Social Media. People have to make videos. People have to record audio. People have to blog. People have to make connections with other people. Everything they need to do, I do every day, in a quality fashion. My conversion occurs when someone decides to hire me to do what they don’t want to do or can’t do as well as I can. If you don’t know how your conversion occurs, there might not BE one.

SM is for communicating, listening, learning and sharing. Unless you get paid for one of those things, you probably won’t make money directly FROM Social Media. There are lots of people that make money by teaching other people how to use SM or by using the knowledge they already have to become the Media Department for several clients, but that’s the same process I’ve already described.. using SM to demonstrate your proficiencies in SM and attracting people who would rather pay you to do something right that it’ll take them much longer to do as well as doing a much poorer job, making their business look low-budget, thus attracting fewer customers and having their corner-cutting directly affect their bottom line.

Businesses use the search capabilities to find instances of people talking about their brands or products. They make communities or groups or pages so that people can have somewhere to find out about current events or promotions they’re offering. Some of them hire ghost-writers to be their internet presence for them. Any way you look at it, Social Media is a MEANS and not an END. Amassing an audience is only the first part. It’s like booking a theater and advertising your play. If nobody cares about your production, you won’t sell any tickets. If you sell some tickets and your production is garbage, word of mouth will work AGAINST you instead of FOR you. If you add everyone in creation and then you don’t have anything to say that’s useful to them or informs them of why they should use your company for something instead of the myriad others that provide the same services, you’re not going to see much return for the time, energy and money you spent setting up your network.

Social Media is basically a light that you can shine on yourself. It’s where the game STARTS, not where it ends and you get to relax and watch the profits roll in. It’s your opportunity to reach a global audience or a local audience that might be looking for a company that does what you do. Before you shine that light, you want to figure out what your endgame is, what you’re offering and how you’re going to express that to people without shilling and making yourself a pariah.

Your primary opportunity here exists in socialization… getting to know people and letting them know things about you so they can make educated decisions about whether they’d like to include you in their social or business plans. This is why it’s called SOCIAL Media.

If it had been about everyone trading commercials about themselves and amassing a bunch of people you can sell stuff to and make money, then it would have been called BUSINESS Media… and personally, I wouldn’t even be involved.

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

NYC Thursday Night

Bill Cammack — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:18:21 +0000

Sometimes, you just have one of those days when you see the beauty and the horror of life all at the same time. :D Here’s how my evening went in New York City last night… THURSDAY night. I’m exhausted already, and the weekend doesn’t even start until TONIGHT! :D

I wasn’t supposed to go out last night. Thanks to Facebook’s style of reporting the dates of events, I had misread an event ending at “Midnight on Friday” as BEING on Friday as opposed to being on THURSDAY and ending after 11:59 on Thursday night. However… I had made plans to return my friend’s camera to him on Wednesday, because another friend of mine had told me she wanted to hang out and then completely flaked on me. This meant that I didn’t give him his camera at all on Wednesday, because my reason for going downtown evaporated.

So I made plans to give him his camera on Thursday evening, but due to those plans falling apart, I decided to ask him where he was going to be later that evening, to which he replied that he was going to be at a mutual friend’s birthday party… About which I was wondering “How the hell is he going to that party tonight, when it’s on FRIDAY night?”.. So, Lo and Behold.. I checked Facebook and my friend’s party (actually, my friends’ party, since it was a dual-birthday event) was actually on Thursday and not Friday.

This was a good thing and a bad thing. It was bad because I wasn’t prepared to go partying tonight. It was good because since I had already been getting ready to go downtown earlier to return my friend’s camera, it only took me a few minutes’ more maintenance to be party-ready.

So I break out around 8pm and get the subway downtown without incident…. oh… So the way things are in NYC, there are trendy areas and not-trendy areas. Normally, if you know you want to throw a party and invite a bunch of people (in my case, “a bunch” would equal around 60), you look for a dive bar… You look for somewhere where nobody actually wants to go on a Thursday night, so that a) it’s not noisy and you can hear people talk, b) it’s not crowded, so you can get to your other friends as well as THE BAR!!! and c) it’s not prohibitively expensive or has some kind of dress code that will keep your friends from getting in since they normally look bummy and why should they dress up to come to your birthday party?

So when I had checked the Facebook invite, the location was just about all the way West in Manhattan and just about all the way South = The Meat Packing District = very trendy. Off the bat, I was like oh-kayyyyyy… and I was expecting to see the type of people that I saw. I was completely willing to endure this to go see my friends for their birthday, but under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have set foot in that part of town.

Here’s the problem with real estate in Manhattan, NYC… If one place becomes popular, for dining, drinking, shopping, whatever… Fine. If two or three become popular, fine. Once an entire area becomes popular, people get greedy and stupid. As soon as they find out that people have given them the seal of approval and they start getting traffic into their establishments, they start changing rules. You can’t get in without a collared shirt (for guys). You can’t get in unless you look a certain way. You might have to stand on a long line to get in. There might not be a line at all, but you have to stand in a crowd and hope that the doorman (I refuse to call these people “Bouncers” who are only going to scream into their headsets for help if someone bum-rushes the front door) SELECTS YOU to enter their establishment.

You might have to wait on line while people that the doorman knows walk right in, having just freshly stepped out of a cab 12 seconds ago. You may have to wait on line while people bribe the doorman with handshakes with palmed money exchanges so they can get 12 people in, causing the line to stall until another 12 people exit the establishment… providing that more bribes haven’t been offered.

This causes the people that go to these areas and deal with this nonsense to be certain types of people. It becomes a game of “I’m important and you’re not”. I’m important because I can walk right in. You’re not important because you have to wait on line. I’m important because I’m an attractive and well-dressed female. You’re not important because you’re a guy trying to pull chicks… oh… I forgot a couple… You can’t get in because you don’t have any chicks with you. That’s historically happened to my friends and I that doormen will tell you to your face that they’re not allowing “single guys” into the bar/club. Once that happened a couple of times, we got hip to meeting girls in the street so they could come with us to the bar. There’s also “You can’t get in unless you’re buying bottles or a table”.

“Bottle Service” is this elaborate scam that someone cooked up. What they do is they tell you that there’s no more room for regular customers and the only way you can get in is by buying a bottle or buying a table, which normally consists of several bottles. The reason they want you to buy this service is that they’ve put an extreme markup on the alcohol they’re selling you. The same bottle of vodka you can buy in the store for $20 costs you maybe $80 in the club. The same bottle of champagne that you can buy for a fraction of the price in a store might be $150 or $200 or WHO KNOWS how much.

So it’s a double-scam. The first scam is to relieve you of your money. The second scam is to keep people out of your club unless they agree to these exorbitant prices. You win both ways. You can’t be said to be discriminating because everyone who agrees to pay has a chance to get in. Everyone who gets in pays you tons of money over the actual worth of the alcohol you’re selling them.

Once you experience this, you either say “$&%^ THESE PEOPLE!” or you come back for more. That’s why I was dreading going to The Meat Packing District, because it’s densely populated with people that are coming back for more. They like the game. They like being able to say that they spent $150 on a bottle of champagne. They like being able to say that they bribed a doorman. They also like interacting with OTHER PEOPLE who enjoy this kind of stuff. That’s another problem I have with the area.. The chicks are often fine as hell, because they need to be if they’re going to get a guy to buy their drinks, but they’re there to play the game and I’m not.

So anyway, I get to this area without incident. As soon as I get far enough West, the people change from local Manhattan residents to people strictly enjoying the NYC Nightlife. Who knows where these people come from, but they all alight on this one area to see and be seen. So I get to the bar, I thought. The bar was in a hotel. I walk towards the door and I see that there’s a doorman asking people if they’re there for dinner or drinks. I tell him I’m looking for the beer garden, and he tells me it’s on the corner. I’m like “Thanks”, and I head for the corner.

I wasn’t prepared to see a line to get into a BEER GARDEN, but “When in Rome”, right? Off the bat, I’m thinking “This was a really dumb idea, having a birthday party in a place where people are going to have to wait on a line (plus regulars, plus bribery) to get in. On top of that, the way it was looking, they might have been rejecting people for style of dress, which I had guarded against by bringing a collared, long-sleeve shirt, but you never know. Worst-Case Scenario, I was going to have to text my friends to come outside and get me once I got to the front and the shenanigans started.

So I’m waiting on line, and it barely inches forward every 5 minutes or so. Barely. There are a couple of fine chicks in front of me babbling about nothing… Shopping or something. There are some people behind me babbling about something. I’m not into smalltalk, personally. I can’t deal with it. I just don’t give a #%$&. I need to be doing something constructive with my time or I’m not going to be saying anything at all. Eventually, the guys in front of the girls in front of me start up a conversation with them by going “You’re not from New York, are you?”. hahaha That was very cute, and I’m sure they read that somewhere, except *I* knew that THEY weren’t from here either, because none of us call NYC “New York”. New York is a state. NYC is a city. More importantly, Manhattan is a borough. Asking a gal if she’s from New York means nothing at all, because she could be from the sticks upstate, from a family area in Queens or a dot-commer that lives in Manhattan… Besides, with those obvious Jersey accents, they CLEARLY weren’t from Manhattan. It was still a good intro though and the guys got conversation as the line inched forwards.

Meanwhile, here come the regulars. It’s so funny how you can see them coming. You see how self-important the person feels that’s leading the group to the promised land. You can tell how much he’s hyped up the place and his friends are looking forward to walking right in and enjoying themselves. You watch these people allllll they way until they get too close to the velvet rope and realize that the doorman isn’t unlatching it yet. Their eyes sink and they start wondering what’s happening. You don’t have to be in the front to understand the conversation. :D The leader is shocked and embarrassed that this doorman that always lets them right in is telling them to get on line with everyone else. Then you see them appealing to friendship. No dice. Then you see them saying that they have six people with them and are going to spend a lot of money. No dice. This is where you tell who are the “ballers, shot-callers”. The ballers huddle up and decide how much they’re willing to bribe the doorman to get in. Everyone else turns a little red and starts leading their group to the next best place, meanwhile saying as loudly as possible how this particular place isn’t “worth” standing in line at, etc, etc, then they disappear down the block, never to be seen again.

So I finally get near the front and a homegirl of mine shows up and gives me a hug. That’s how you play it off in NYC like you’ve been waiting for this person the entire time, in case the people behind you try to complain that someone just skipped the line. We’re juuuuuust about to get in this place that I’ve been waiting about a half hour (blogging on my g1 the whole time) to get in, when she notices from Twitter on her iPhone that the birthday boy has announced that the party was moved down the block. I initially told her to go check and text me if that was the case, but he showed up in person to see who was waiting on the line, so that’s why I was willing to leave. It was kind of funny watching people watch our conversation. They had been standing on line just as long as we were, and were kind of astonished at the conversation we were having. I guess they thought that we cared about this establishment, which has the same alcohol as everyone else does, when, in fact, we were there to see our friends for their birthday and as soon as we figured out they were somewhere else, we skated.

So we go to the next bar, which is more laid out like a frat bar. Large screen television with the game playing on it. Lots of loud people cheering over top of the loud music. It just looked like the kind of place where a lot of beer is spilled on the floor by sloppy, drunk people. Nice place though. So we go to the roof, and there’s everyone we wanted to see. Unfortunately, this place was really crowded also, for the reason I stated earlier. It’s one of those places that didn’t have a line and DID have alcohol, so it was an overflow location. This was more my speed because it had regular chicks in it. Unfortunately, due to how crowded and loud it was, I ended up trying to text my friends to come see me when they were close enough that I could have hit them with a paper plane. I actually started texting friends that were STANDING NEXT TO OTHER FRIENDS to see if I could get them to send people over.

Eventually, someone had the good idea to move our group to an empty location. We went back past the hotel/bar with the line in front of it (still), and I saw a friend of mine waiting on line. I asked her if she was looking for the birthday party and she wasn’t. She was heading to meet other friends that were actually inside. My group crossed the street and entered this Thai food place that had an empty upstairs section. THIS is where the party should have been from the beginning! :D Lots of space, not very loud music, people could sit down or socialize and meet each other. Easy access to the bar as well as to the birthday boy and girl. So that part was fun and useful and I met people that I’ve followed online, via Social Media, but had never met IRL (in real life) or f2f (face to face), so, up until that point, that was the totally best part of the evening! :D

So then, someone decided to move it back across the street to the same doorway that I had first approached with the doorman asking people if they were there for dinner. When we get there, there’s some kind of holdup at the door. Knowing this area, it could have been ANYTHING. Still too crowded inside to seat our party, people not dressed a certain way, who knows? So I get closer, and there’s this drunk guy arguing with two bouncers for the place. These were actual bouncers. Like I said earlier, the doorman was nowhere to be seen. :D Bouncers are dressed differently from doormen because they might have to get their hands dirty. No point in fighting people in a suit and shoes. So this is really funny, because the drunk guy gets off a couple of choice snaps about the fat bouncer, saying something about weight watchers or Jenny Craig (this guy was CLEARLY off his rocker, drunk out of his mind, and if he had been in a different part of town would have been beaten up for 1/8 of the stuff he said to these guys). So that was that for that location. Our group was rustled out of there and several blocks down the street to a different establishment.

Meanwhile, this whole time, I’ve been texting and updating my Social Media location-based apps, trying to catch up with my homegirls that live in that area. There are so many bars in NYC that you can be within six blocks of a friend and never run into each other unless you carefully plan it. While my group was moving bar to bar, their group was moving through different bars nearby. Under normal circumstances, I would have skated and gone to see them, but I wanted to hang out for the birthday festivities, so I hung with those ’till the end….

So we arrive at the next place and it’s too crowded with people dancing, so someone that knows the neighborhood ushers us to yet ANOTHER location. This spot was suspicious from the giddyap. We had walked so far that we were no longer in the touristy area. This was a REAL dive bar. It was also about 1:00 am at this point. I bring that up to say that I had already been partying for ~5 hours and also to say that we were about an hour and a half short from when bars close in NYC, around 3am – 4am. So I just didn’t like how this place looked… AT. ALL. :/

In the movie “Ronin”, Robert De Niro says “I never walk into a place I don’t know how to walk out of”. I’m the same way, except I would say that AS I’m walking into a place, I’m creating my plans for walking back out of it. That starts with the bouncer. This guy was sitting down outside. It was odd. Bouncers are supposed to be standing, unless there’s a designated chair for them to sit in, which is normally a high chair so they’re on eye-level with incoming customers. This guy was sitting on a chair outside, like he was a customer, messing with his phone. There was ZERO air of authority about this guy. He reminded me of a friend of mine that used to be a bouncer for a bar I used to go to. He had ZERO credentials for bouncing other than he was ready and willing to get into a fight with someone and he looked intimidating. These people are dangerous because THEY know they’re nobodies, but while you’re inside their establishment, they get to ACT LIKE SOMEBODY, and that’s really not who you want to hire. However.. Most times, you can get people like this to work for cash, under the table, so it’s cost-effective, and in that part of town (far west, lower village area), they probably don’t get any fights anyway, so the guy’s just there for show.

I had been texting my girls, so I was the last one in the door. Because the bouncer was sitting down, I didn’t see him until I was standing right in front of him. He looked up at me with a bad look. It felt like he had thought his night was over and now he was going to have to work some more and he blamed us for being customers. So I look at this guy, give him the head-lift and say “What’s Up?”. He says nothing. Problem #2. You normally give yourself away as a CREEP if you can’t be courteous to people. That’s magnified if a) you’re a representative of a business, and b) I’m supposed to as YOU for help if a problem jumps off inside. There’s just about nothing worse than an untrustworthy bouncer.

So as SOON as I crossed the threshold, I’m checking out everyone in the place. There was one set of “outsiders” there, and the rest of the people were regulars or worked there. I walked to the back area of the place to make sure I knew how many people were here and what kinds of people they were. There was another bouncer placing chairs upside down on tables in the back. This was another probably-works-for-cash person, so this was even more of a problem than if there had just been one of them.

So, my friends, being oblivious to the situation, go ahead and sit down and start chatting. I stayed at the bar, texting my girls and updating my location while I’m talking to this guy I know that was part of our group. This particular guy usually gets VEEEEERY drunk when we all hang out. This usually isn’t a problem because of the places we normally patronize. This was not one of those places.

So this guy orders another drink, pays for it and then stumbles to the front door to go smoke a cigarette. Next thing I know, he comes back through the door and staggers over to his drink that’s next to me on the bar, mumbling something about (pardon my French, but it’s important to the story) “… that guy’s an asshole…”. Now.. At 1:20 am, in that part of town, the ONLY guy outside was the problematic bouncer dude. So now, I know there was some beef that happened between them. :/ Now, I’m looking for this guy, who’s nobody, to come in the door acting like somebody, and that’s exactly what he did.

So about 1:30 am, the bouncer comes back in the door, and with NO SIGNAL from the bartender (who may very well have also been the owner, because he was pretty ancient and the ladies there at the side of the bar seemed to be related to him), the bouncer goes “ALRIGHT!… LAST CALL!” … So I look at the time on my g1, and it’s like 1:30, so I’m like “ok… This guy’s rushing us out of here. We have a problem.”

So my group buys their last drinks. I already had my one drink I was buying from that place, so I was good. Probably about ten minutes pass after the bouncer’s announcement, and I’m looking down, texting to find out where my girls are and looking up their last known location on Google Maps, and I notice that the bouncer’s moving from the door towards my group “too fast”. When you’re keeping an eye on a situation, you allow people certain leeway… a certain range of actions or motions until they’re detected as actively hostile. The bouncer headed over and he was talking really loudly about something. Since he wasn’t heading for me, I looked for his backup, who was standing pretty far away and not heading over. The bartender wasn’t moving either, so the bouncer was making this move on his own…

He comes over barking something about smoking inside an establishment, and swiftly approaches my overly-drunk friend, screaming and cursing at him. Apparently, this guy had lit up a cigarette??? I don’t know huh :D I never saw it. I never smelled it. I wasn’t paying attention to him, though. In NYC, you aren’t allowed to smoke indoors, which is why bars with outdoor areas have gained in popularity/patronage since that law was passed. The way this guy came over, though, he had been looking for a reason to continue whatever beef he had had with my friend when he had gone to smoke outside. I was happy that when he arrived at my friend’s location, he told him to get up and get out and kicked him out of the establishment rather than attacking him in some fashion. Like I said, I hadn’t seen a cigarette at all, but my friend was like “ok, ok” and accepted being thrown out, so I can only guess that he at least had a cigarette in his hand?

What I WASN’T happy about was that right after he threw my friend out, this same bouncer goes “OK… THAT’S IT… WE’RE CLOSING!… YOU HAVE FIVE MINUTES TO DRINK YOUR DRINKS AND GET OUT!”. So now, I’m thinking “Who owns this place? What’s going on here?”.. Dude was clearly mad and only slightly still in control of himself. That was all my friends needed to start getting out, besides the fact that we weren’t going to sit in there socializing with one of us kicked out on the street. So I finished my beer and exited the establishment around 1:40 am, which is still at least one hour short of an honest “last call” in Manhattan, NYC.

So everyone was breaking out, so I said my goodbyes and started heading towards my homegirls’ last known location. While I’m walking that way, I’m texting them that I’m heading that way to meet them. Since I’m walking and texting, I can’t see that the sidewalk is uneven and I trip and stumble towards some chick that’s walking towards me. She grabs my arm, which is the only reason I looked at her face, since it’s one of those “hostile maneuvers”, and it turns out that it’s the gal I’ve been trying to meet up with all night. :D Just like I hadn’t texted her until I was already walking to say that I was coming to see her, she hadn’t texted that she was coming to see me, and we happened to walk down the same block and run into each other.

So we head back to the corner I had just left and go to a bar across the street that’s obviously still open and running because it’s only 1:50 am at this point. She texts the other gal to come meet us and goes to the bar to pick up drinks. The bartender says that he recognizes her because she’s friends with the owner’s wife. When I ask her what happened, she says the owner’s wife’s name, and I’m like “I interviewed with her for a job back in the day! :D”.. So the other gal shows up and the three of us kick it ’till 3-something, with the bartender NEVER calling “last call” and no bouncer necessary to hire for this place that’s on the very same block as the last one I was chillin’ in.

Thursday Night Damage Report:
Got to represent for my friends’ birthdays.
Made three new Facebook/IRL friends that I’ve never met before.
Met several people IRL that I had already been following through SM.
Caught up with 20-30 people I haven’t seen in a long time.

So now, I’m totally hating the fact that it’s Friday, because I’m all socialized out. Meanwhile, I’m totally loving the randomness and fun of last night.. Especially since it was a Thursday.. an off-brand evening that should have been nothing out of the ordinary. Instead, I left the house @ 8pm and got back home @ 4am, 8 hours later, having enjoyed tons of fun, fellowship and camaraderie!

Thanks to everyone involved!.. I had a great evening, thanks to my Social Media friends. I think I’m taking tonight off, but it’s only lunchtime… There’s another 6-8 hours left for me to figure out a reason to hit the streets and do it all over again! ;)

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

Is Your Girlfriend or Boyfriend a Liar?

Bill Cammack — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:35:59 +0000

My ex and I had a superbly, fantastically EXCELLENT relationship for approximately four years… She would lie to me, and I would catch her lying. :D

I’m sure that doesn’t sound excellent to *you*, but it was for me. The fact that she was constantly lying meant that she was constantly trying to get over on me. It meant that she was going ALL OUT to get her way in situations. I admire and respect that, and I’m the same way. I want to WIN. I like being around people that WANT TO WIN and are willing to do whatever they have to do to achieve their goals.

What’s good about liars?

The fantastic part about this is that I kept experiencing instances where I could collect data about how she acts, sounds and looks when she’s telling the truth and when she isn’t. Eventually, maybe one year into our relationship, well, let’s say the ‘romantic’ part of our relationship, since we’re still close, to this very day… I had learned her behaviors so well that I could tell by her breathing patterns how she felt about things. There was this little “catch” in her breathing that would occur when she stopped “being” and started “thinking”. It was like Keanu seeing the double-cat in The Matrix. I knew that whatever I was about to get was something she was crafting or making up as opposed to something that she was naturally giving me, from her heart & soul.

The reason this is important is that I knew more about her than she wanted me to know. This allowed me to make decisions from a solid foundation of believing her or NOT believing her, because I was reacting to what she was subconsciously giving me instead of what she was consciously trying to feed me.

How did this come up?

I thought about this because I saw a video the other day with a guy and a gal talking to each other. I had never seen the guy before in my life. The gal asked him a question, and his reply was “UHHHHHHHH”. Now, he had been talking to her regularly before that. He heard everything she had to say before that. All of a sudden, he needed to stall for time, and his face entirely changed as if he had just started calculating what he was going to say to her. I was like “This guy’s lying”. Right off the bat. He hadn’t lied YET, but it was on the way, because instead of genuinely responding, he paused and had to decide how he was going to play this situation out.

Come to find out a little later in the video that the reason he was suddenly crafting his responses was that he had FAILED to deliver what he had promised to bring her. HE KNEW IT, but he didn’t want to say so while the cameras were running. He was lying by omission. He was deliberately leaving pertinent information out in an attempt to get over.

So I’m looking at this like “Man… This guy’s really transparent. He’s such a BAD LIAR! :D” and that’s what reminded me of my ex transparently lying to me in my face. SHE didn’t know that *I* knew damned well that she was completely lying, and that’s the way I LIKED IT, because since she thought she was getting over, she never changed her style of lying and I always felt confident about whether I should base anything on what she just said or not.

Barring an actually HONEST female, the best ones to date are the ones that think they’re smarter than you, except they’re NOT! :D

What do you believe?

Personally, in social situations, like, “kickin’ it” situations, I don’t believe ANYTHING a female has to say. Nothing. Not. One. Thing. It has nothing to do with her being female, but rather that people in general have agendas and will come after you for whatever they want to do with you. I’ve been historically lied to by females so much that I’m rollin’ with “Guilty Until Proven Innocent”. This is why it was so great that my ex tried so hard and so often to get over on me so that I could honestly judge when she was lying to me, but way more importantly… When she was telling the truth!

What happens in most situations is that people don’t receive this education about their SOs, and then THE BIG LIE comes down the pipe and catches them slippin’. Two outs in the ninth with bases loaded, and you just got caught looking at a fastball down the middle. You’re out. You Lose. Game over.

Test the brakes.

Being in a relationship with someone that you don’t KNOW is like driving a car FAST without testing whether the brakes work. In the dating game, people are trying to procure a situation they fantasized about. They MIGHT think about what YOU want after that… Maybe. That means it’s up to YOU to figure out a way where you can determine when the other person’s lying to you so you don’t make any important decisions based on false or deliberately fabricated information.

Here’s an example that’s rather typical…. Guy meets girl. Guy kicks it with girl. Guy spends time alone with girl and it’s time to do that thing… Guy gets out condom. Girl says “You don’t need that… I’m on the pill.”

Lots of guys have gone out like suckers for this line. Unfortunately, her statement means NOTHING. AT. ALL. unless you can TRUST what she says. You can’t trust what she says unless you know her deeply and intimately as a person. You can’t know her like that if you haven’t had deep conversations with her, and especially not if you just saw her at the bar, thought she was FOYINE and picked her up because you felt like tappin’ that.

Unfortunately, guys feel like “hittin’ it raw” (sex without having to use a condom) is an achievement. It isn’t. It’s ESPECIALLY NOT an achievement when she offers the same thing to every guy she kicks it with. It’s actually potentially dangerous to your health, AND will land you on The Maury Show.

Thanks to “I’m on the pill”, a lot of dudes ended up funding 18 years of a kid’s life. Thanks to “I’m only kickin’ it with you”, a lot of dudes ended up in the free clinic.

Of course, that’s true for the ladies also… Thanks to “I can’t have kids” (which is used surprisingly often by guys to get girls to *not* require condoms and apparently gets over a lot as well), a lot of gals ended up with kids. :/ Thanks to “I’m only kickin’ it with you”, a lot of women ended up in the free clinic… or worse….

Don’t try this at home.

Unfortunately.. This information’s only useful to you IF you can mentally, emotionally or empathically “Feel” your girlfriend. If you can’t, all you end up with is a bunch of situations where you find yourself going “Damn… She lied about that.”… “Damn… She lied about THAT!”… “Damn… She lied about that TOO!”… “Damn…”

If that’s the experience you’re having, then it’s NOT a good thing if your girl’s a liar, and you might want to think about trading her in for one that comes standard with the honesty feature. Either way, it’s better for you to talk to her as much as possible and get to know her ways of being and patterns before you get hornswoggled and end up with kids you didn’t ask for or looking like the dude on Monopoly, pulling your pockets inside-out to show how empty they are.

~ Bill | @BillCammack

How Do You Make Money With Social Media?

Bill Cammack — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 03:19:11 +0000

So, The other day, I go to lunch with a friend of mine who isn’t into Social Media. I start showing him my personal fansite, my business site, Facebook, Twitter / TweetDeck, blip.tv, YouTube, Tumblr, Ustream, IRC, Skype, iChat, so then he goes:

“So how do you make money with all this stuff?”

So I laughed a little, because I knew I had a long, LONG explanation ahead of me. :D

Special Case

Before I get started with this, I need to mention that I’m a special case. PART of what I’m about to say will be useful to someone else. Most of it’s only useful to me.

My entire life is a special case. I’m very used to being the only… whatever. :D I’m usually the only non-white around in business situations. I’m normally the only MIT graduate in ANY situaton. I’m normally the only guy that’s messed with and quit more girls than most guys ever get to even TALK TO THEM ABOUT SEX in their entire lives.

I’m normally the only person that’s been videoblogging STEADILY since 2006 and put over 600 episodes on the net in that time. I’m normally the only Emmy Award-Winning video editor in a situation.

I’m normally the only person in the room that you can find on page 01 of Google if you search just my first name. On and on and on, so if you’re looking for some sort of “This will work for everyone” advice, this isn’t the article for you. :)

Why I’m Involved With Social Media

I’m involved with Social Media because that’s what I do. Period. Social Media is how I live my life. It’s how I interact with my friends. It’s how I do business. It’s how I learn about the world and meet new people. It’s how I express myself in a one-to-many fashion instead of a one-on-one fashion. It’s the reason I have friends in England, Hawaii, New Zealand, Japan, France, Mexico, Canada and all the way across the board in the United States of America. It’s the reason I’m in a YouTube video that’s been viewed one and a quarter million times…

Social Media enables us to be way more than we could be if we had to depend on physical interaction with people. It’s my own personal video game and I rock it to the best of my ability.

How Social Media Works For Me

Social Media’s about conversation and communication. The by-products include familiarity, endearment or infamy, and, in general, *ATTENTION*. Once you get that attention, you want to direct it somewhere so it can be useful for a purpose. In my case, I direct the attention I’ve generated to my blog.

Why my blog? Because I own it. My name is on it. Bill Cammack Dot Com. My name is not on Facebook (meaning not in the base address). My name is not on Twitter. My name is not on Tumblr or blip or YouTube. It’s on BillCammack.com.

Why does it matter that my name is on my blog? Because that’s what I want to show up in Google. Why do I want it to show up in Google? Because that’s what everyone on the planet uses to find people and topics they’re interested in. 67% (2/3) of my traffic comes from Google. So, to recap… I interact with my friends via Social Media. I use a bunch of 3rd party sites to communicate with people, but they all point back to MY website. Because of that, my site gets (relatively) a lot of hits and becomes more “popular” or perhaps relevant on Google. Good standing in Google makes more people show up at my site, because I rank higher in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Ranking higher makes my site get more hits and the snowball keeps rolling down the hill, getting larger with each revolution.

How Do You Monetize Website Hits?

This is where the “Special Case” kicks in. :)

It just so happens that what I do for fun and self-expression is the same thing I do for business. The media that I put on the net stands as a consistently-updating resume of what I can do for you or your company. I’m constantly demonstrating to people that I can film, edit, compress, upload, tag and blog videos in a quality fashion. When someone sees this and wants that same quality for their business or personal site, I receive an email from a new potential client.

This is why it wasn’t going to be easy to explain to my friend how I make money from Social Media. I use my sites as loss leaders:

Loss Lead describes the concept that an item offered for sale at a reduced price and is intended to lead to the subsequent sale of other items, the sales of which will be made in greater numbers, or greater profits, or both.

So, What my sites do is a) demonstrate personality and b) demonstrate proficiency.

What my sites do *not* do is attempt to hook people into buying something in return for whatever entertainment or education they received from watching my videos or reading my blog posts. This is why my friend was confused. He couldn’t figure out how I convert people coming to my site or how I convert any of my other Social Media interactions into $,$$$.

My game is *awareness*. If you google Emmy Award Editor, you get *me*. If you google Video Editor Resume, you get *me*. If you google He Doesn’t Care, you get *me*. If you google Avoid Pregnancy, you get *me*. on and on and on and on and on. So what happens if you come to my site? My video editing demo reel is in my sidebar in an embedded flash player as well as a clickable link directly to an .mp4 file you can watch on your iPhone or gPhone right now. :D There’s also a direct link to my resume, if anyone felt interested in checking it out.

Is there a high rate of conversion to this situation? No. :) The thing is, there doesn’t have to be. It’s passively-generated attention. I go to sleep and people visit my website. I go out partying and people visit my website. I’m working, making money, and people are visiting my website. I put out ZERO EFFORT other than site maintenance, which I have to do anyway, and I’m advertising myself all day and all night, which my quantcast badge in my sidebar will attest to, which currently reads “7,687 Monthly People”. ==>

So, if only one person out of a thousand plays my demo reel or checks out my resume or watches videos I’ve filmed, edited or participated in, that’s seven people per month or 84 people a year that become aware of Bill Cammack without my ever having to go knock on their door and attempt to sell them an encyclopedia.. Capisce? ;)

oh….. And that’s assuming that that one person out of a thousand doesn’t tell AAAAAAAAAANYBODY they know about me or my site. Once you consider that someone might post a link to your content on their favorite Social Media site and start an entire conversation about it, where everyone they talk to can come back to the same site and see the same content they mentioned, you start to see how the viral nature of the internet works in the favor of he or she who makes his or her own site and populates it with quality content…. Who comes up FIRST when you google Dating Women NYC ?… Facebook? Twitter? FriendFeed?… Nope. *I* do. :D

So, if sidebar content is low-percentage for conversion, where does the real action take place?….. On the back-channel…

The Back-Channel

In Social Media, there are interactions that go on in front of everyone’s eyes and then there are interactions that only occur privately, which I refer to as “The Back-Channel”. As much time as I devote to public media output, I devote way more to back-channel conversation. On any given day, I’m doing 16-20 hours of private online interactions with people, which really translates more to ~35 hours a day, because, since I don’t use the telephone, I get to hold several conversations simultaneously.

This is why I don’t have to do my wheeling & dealing in public. The public side is for me to explain to people what I can do for them. The private side is for people to contact me about their projects, and for us to decide whether we want to work together.

This also occurs IRL. You might see me standing in a bar, having a brew with someone, but what you don’t know is that we’re talking business. When you walk over, the conversation suddenly changes, because *YOU* aren’t involved in our business dealings. This gives you the impression that I’m always frivolously socializing, when, meanwhile, I currently have 431 Linkedin connections and almost four times as many Facebook connections (1589).

So the blogging, which I do for my own entertainment, satisfaction & socialization, serves to populate the back-channel and also to give people an idea of who I am, what I’m about and the level of quality I can bring to their productions. I don’t have to make money directly from my sites. In fact.. Other than clients I already had before I got involved with Social Media in 2006,*EVERYONE* I currently do work for found out about me on the internet or was introduced to me by someone I was connected to online.

Could I make a few dollars with Google Ads? Probably… A Few…. I found that it wasn’t worth it (to me) to have random ads incessantly littering my pages. I’d rather endorse companies that I believe in or that I’m affiliated with or that are clients of mine. I’ve run ads in the past and I’m not saying I’ll never do it again. I’m saying I’d rather offer my audience a quality reading experience, which IME causes them to read more and feel like finding out more about who Bill Cammack is, which adds more people to my back-channel and eventually more $,$$$ to my bottom line.

What If I Don’t Have A Marketable Skill?

A lot of people that have websites don’t actually *DO* anything… They just REPORT about stuff that other people did. If that’s your game, and you can’t put the attention you garner from the internet to work for yourself, you need to put it to work for someone else. The best way to do that, IMO, is sponsorships. Look for people that believe in what you’re doing, believe in your content and believe in you as a person and find out from them what they would like to receive in return for funding you to do your site.

Let’s say for instance that your game is aggregating information you read on Twitter & Facebook and regurgitating that to your viewers/listeners/readers. You may very well be able to get someone (or several “someone”s) to sponsor you, because they would rather read what you selected than search for it themselves. It might be worth a couple of dollars to them to enable you to do what you already do, except better and more often. I you didn’t have to go to work so much, you could spend more time aggregating content and repackaging it for your fans & followers.

Other options are affiliate ads or Google ads.

Another route you can go is to align yourself with blogs that will pay you to blog for them. Dunno how lucrative that is, but it might be better than flippin’ burgers @ McDonalds…. Maybe.

Shilling

The opposite of what I do is what I refer to as shilling. This would be when every time someone contacts you, there’s something they’re hoping to get out of it. To the uninitiated and uninformed, this seems to be the way to go, which is why everyone’s trying to figure out how to get more Twitter followers. They think that having more people supposedly reading their twitter posts gives them more influence, when, in reality, it’s as low-percentage as my sidebar-game.

I have 2,595 Twitter followers. I’ve seen people with TEN TIMES AS MANY followers host live streams and have exactly the same amount of people in it that I can pull, if not WAY FEWER. Twitter is not some kind of walkie-talkie. People aren’t waiting for your post so they can jump into action. Unfortunately, a lot of people act like that’s the best utilization of their “voice”, and turn their “channel” into 100% infomercials and advertisements.

What do *I* do with these people? Ignore them. If I see an email from them, it gets skipped. If I see a twitter post from them, I don’t bother to read it so I can have something advertised to me again. They’re like television commercials in the age of DVRs (digital video recorders), easily fast-forwarded.

This is what people expect to see when they come to your site. They expect you to try to SQUEEEEZE some money out of them for what you’re offering. Don’t play yourself. If what you’re offering has value which you can demonstrate to them, that’s all you need.

Why Bill Cammack Gets Pizaid

Ultimately.. I get paid because I can do things other people can’t do. Period. I do it better. I do it faster. I’ve spent time learning things that people don’t know, so if they don’t want to pay me to do it for them, they can pay someone else or take the time (if they have enough time) to learn it for themselves, buy the proper equipment and DO IT FOR FREE (minus equipment purchase costs) on their own.

Most people don’t have time to waste, learning skills that they’re never going to be able to use again. If they teach themselves how to edit, they’re never going to get a steady job editing. Also, the time they’re spending learning what I already know is time they’re *not* spending making money for themselves. This is why I don’t need to convince or persuade people that they should hire me. The reasons are obvious and there are more reasons every single day.

This is why I don’t need to directly advertise myself to people. I don’t get PAID from my websites. I get ATTENTION from my websites, and then I do whatever I want with my Social Capital. I’ve also built a foundation for any business endeavors I choose to become involved in. Whatever I want someone to pay me to do, I have at least two years’ worth of examples of my being involved in internet website and content creation. I have over TEN YEARS of experience editing videos, including several years of being an Emmy judge and an International Emmy judge.

I don’t have to convince anyone of anything. I don’t have to sell anybody anything. I don’t need to monetize my websites. I don’t need to get money for the hours that I spend writing articles like this. I build my community through Social Media so that when I come up with an idea for business, I have THOUSANDS of people that I can inform about my idea RIGHT. NOW… TODAY!, and if someone’s interested, we can definitely make this happen.

Interestingly enough… NOT SELLING THINGS TO PEOPLE works so well for me that I often have to AVOID business conversations with people, because I really, HONESTLY didn’t approach them to try to get some money from them. :) I have to actively steer the conversation away from what I do so I’m not associated with the people that only walk up to you, shake your hand and give you a hug because they’re trying to get paid. Let’s have fun when it’s time to have fun and do business when it’s time to do business. ;)

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

Dating Above Your Station

Bill Cammack — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:46:13 +0000

So, The Kid was invited out to lunch the other day by a female friend of mine. This was *not* a date, but the issues are relevant to dating, because the only difference is I wasn’t trying to get laid…. So the way it went down, she ended up selecting the place…

This is important because I like to keep it simple when I eat. I normally stick to your garden-variety American food, Hamburgers, Hot Dogs, Pizza, Shrimp Fried Rice, you know, regular food.

So, if I had picked the spot, none of this would have happened to me. :)

So, I’m like “uh-oh” off the bat, because the place she picked had an Italian-sounding name, and it wasn’t Sbarro’s or Olive Garden. So I knew I was about to be outclassed. That’s what this post is about. Grace Under Pressure. How to carry yourself when you’re that proverbial fish out of water.

Be Punctual (on time)

So when you’re going somewhere to meet a gal, it’s extremely in your best interest to be AT LEAST on time, if not EARLY. I covered this base by exiting the subway 15 minutes before meetup time and lounging within striking distance of the restaurant. I needed to not get there first, because the reservation was in HER name. I needed to not get there LATE, because The Kid is courteous to his lady-friends *bows* :D So I kept my eye on the clock on my G1, while Twittering, eMailing & AIMing to pass the time.

Two minutes until my mark, I was standing across the street from the restaurant doing a final systems check on my smartphone. Let me switch my usual wallpaper of me licking some chick’s neck to a sunset or something. Check! Let me delete this text message thread from this other chick. Check! Let me terminate all processes so the wrong website doesn’t come up if I choose to show her something on my browser. Check!!! I was ready.

So I walk in the spot, and it’s this really nice (to me, anyway, hahaha) Italian place. I look at the bar and don’t see her. I walk a little further into the place, looking for whomever’s paying attention to me, which means they work there. This cute blonde chick starts walking over and I can tell she’s one of the greeters. I give her my friend’s name for the reservation so she can see if she’s here already and she goes over to the computer to check…. This is when I notice…….

This. Chick. Is. Fine. Than. A. GOOD-GoodGoogeleMoogela…… DAYUM!!! O_o

Keep Your EYES On The PRIZE

So, all of a sudden, I have a problem. I was cool, calm and suave until I noticed that this chick had more bounce to the ounce. I mean DAYUMMM!!! :D JEEZ!!! :D So now, I don’t want to meet my friend for lunch AT. ALL., because all energy from the dilithium crystals have been diverted to my only goal in life, which is hooking up with this chick I just saw 20 seconds ago for the first time in my life. DAYUM!

This is where GAME has to kick in. This is where experience has to carry you to irrational decisions. This is that playoff situation where the ballplayer is really good during the regular season, then chokes when it really counts. Experience is the only thing that will keep your eyes on the prize. I mean, my eyes were SQUARELY. ON. THE. PRIZE… but that wasn’t *THE* prize, dig?.. I was there for a specific reason, so I had to get my enjoyment on, mark it down for future reference and get my act back together… NOW! :D

INexperience would have placed me at my friend’s table completely out of my mind and unable to function as a gentleman. Not acceptable. Ain’t Goin’ Out. Like. That! Ain’t Goin’ Out. Like. That! (WE AIN’T GOIN’ OUT!!!)

So, my future ex-wife leads me to my friend’s table and I’ve cleared my head out and I’m back on point by the time I greet her with a nice kiss on the cheek. I thank my beloved and she leaves me a menu and breaks north as my focus remains directly on my friend instead of the greeter-chick’s ass.

So we’re chatting about this and that from sneakers to hats, and here comes the… I don’t know what his title is. He’s the guy that announces what the specials are, but he doesn’t actually bring you anything, and he isn’t the greeter either. So there’s the greeter to bring you in from the door to your seat, this guy, then the runners who actually bring you stuff and then the waiters?… Anyway…

So he asks if we’d like anything to drink. Anybody who knows The Kid knows he asked THE WRONG PERSON if I wanted something to drink! haha

Meanwhile, you don’t want to come off like a Cro-Mag, like “I’mma drink REGARDLESS, SUNNNNN!” :D So, beside the fact that you always have the ladies order before the men, I had to place the ball in her court, because worst-case scenario, I would have suffered through a non-alcoholic beverage for the sake of the hangout. I didn’t WANT TO, but I *would* have! :D

Play It Off

Fortunately, even though she wasn’t “drinking”, she didn’t mind if I did, so I asked dude what the beer list was. This is where I realized what my next obstacle was going to be. He rattles off a list of beers, and I can baaaaaaarely understand what he’s saying. I mean, I know what the names of the beers are, but I need to decipher his accent. Apparently, they hired a SPANISH dude to work in an ITALIAN restaurant, :/ so now, I have a big problem, because I can’t even understand when he says Heineken or Blue Moon. I *KNOW* I’m gonna be TOAST when it gets to the MENU! :/

So there was only one beer that he named that I totally had never heard of. It was an Italian beer, so I said I’d have one of those. When in Rome, right? :D So he disappears and we keep chatting. At some point, I realize she had already retrieved her napkin from the table, which meant it was sitting in her lap. I followed suit, ASAP. I normally wait until they bring the food, but it’s usually a good idea to mirror the sensibilities of the lady you’re sitting across from. BTW, for those of youse that don’t know, this is another courtesy issue. It’s not like you actually believe you’re going to spill something on yourself, it’s just what you do… like not having your elbows on the table and not eating as soon as they bring your food if the other people at your table haven’t been served yet.

So the beer was good and the conversation was good, and then it came to the moment of truth. Dude comes back and is like “Would you like to hear the specials of the day?” So I refrain from asking if the blonde chick could tell us instead of him, and he starts talking.

Act As If

Now, I probably know about 12 different foods, Hamburger, Steak, Shrimp, a couple of different types of Fish, Hot Dogs, Pizza and all those weeds that they call Thai food, etc. OH, and I’ve heard of Tofu. So this guy proceeds to rattle off all these names of expensive-sounding Italian dishes with a Spanish accent and even if I had ever heard of the food-types he was talking about, I wouldn’t have been able to decipher what he was saying, so I kept nodding as if I knew what was going on. Every once in a while, I would smile and then look at her, like “Oh! Doesn’t THAT sound delicious? :D” I had no. I. DEA. what he was saying.

So he leaves the menu, which, fortunately, had English subtitles under each dish description. Now, I’m looking at the section that says “Specials”, because the Spanish dude had asked if we’d like to hear the specials, right? So it’s like the lowest-priced item was like $18. Now, before Frank starts jumping up and down… She had already told me lunch was on her. So I was playing the reverse role and tryin’na Keep It Cheap! :D

So I decide I’m going to have the $18 Salmon (which is *NOT* pronounced with an “L” in it….. SAAMUNN. Just like how there’s no G in SANDWICH). So dude comes back and I have her order first, and she says blah blah blah which I didn’t understand, since she ordered in Italian, so I wasn’t EVEN gonna play myself by trying to say the Italian title, so I go “I’ll have the salmon and pointed to it on the menu. So, the dude looks at me funny, like as if *I*M* the one with the accent :/ So I’m like “The salmon… This one, right here”, and I hold the menu up so he can see what I want. So dude looks confused and I’m thinking JEEZ, what’s the problem now? So then he goes:

“um……….. That’s an appetizer.”

So now, I’ve played myself, due to the fact that since I don’t speak or read Italian, I had no idea where the appetizers ended and the actual meals started. Of course, with my TGI Friday’s-going-ass, I didn’t imagine that it was possible that an APPETIZER would cost $18. :/ I mean, damn… Once you get in the double-digits…. Anyway… So, instead of doing a Fonzie, and going “I knew that.”, I stuck to my guns that I wanted salmon, and my friend suggested that I get the actual meal that included salmon. I allowed the announcer to go BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH as if I understood what he was saying was going to be surrounding the salmon when he brought it, smiled, nodded at him, said “That’s great. I’ll have that.” and thanked him whilst handing over the menu.

Hold It Down

Now.. The key to navigating that very embarrassing situation is to remember who you are.. That is.. if you ARE anybody. That’s a loss I was perfectly willing to eat, because I never claimed to know anything about menus written in Italian. I also don’t know anything about soup. I also don’t know anything about wine, other than it comes in the color red and a clearish color that they call white. They both get me drunk, so I couldn’t care less which one is available to me. That’s who I am. I don’t hang out with the Duke & Duchess of York at their castle (or wherever Dukes live) with the long, 18-person dining tables. I don’t go “Skiing in the AspenS”. I couldn’t give a flying &@#$ about stuff like that, so there are going to be times that I’m just going to have to take a loss and look like I don’t know what I’m doing. :D

So, There were more mishaps, but I’m sure you’re already bored. The bottom line is that everything isn’t always going to be rosy in The Game. There are going to be situations that come up that are going to throw you off. How you deal with those situations is going to determine whether you correct yourself and succeed or spiral out of control, crash & burn. One of the WORST issues, IMO, is feeling dumb or stupid or outclassed. Your only refuge in situations like that is reminding yourself WHO. YOU. ARE… WHAT. YOU. DO… and how well you do it.

It’s like when someone was snapping on you back in the day, and the only thing that kept you from losing it was you knew that after he finished talking ALL KINDS OF GARBAGE about you, you were gonna go “That’s not what YOUR *MOMS* said last night!” and the whole crowd was gonna ERUPT because you just pulled out the stops, and his only recourse was to try to throw the hands with you and catch a critical beatdown.

You have to have that mental location where you take refuge when the going gets tough. You have to be able to retreat from the reality of embarrassment and dwell in the realm of your own ultimate flyness until you can stand to get back in the game. It’s ALL about Crunch-Time… Grace under Pressure. Those bad situations feel like a ton of bricks at the time, but if you make it through with poise, you’ll gain more cool points for that then what you lost for ordering the equivalent of calamari when you were supposed to order steak & eggs.

Character & Distinction

Anybody can come off fly when things are going well for them. When you can still “hold your head” in the midst of adversity, that’s where your character shines through and you distinguish yourself from the masses. Conversation over your head?.. Play it cool and then bring it back down to a level you can kick it on. Chick’s talking about places you’ve never been (and really don’t have any intentions on ever GOING? :D), tell her about being on 125th or the L.E.S. or Central Park in the middle of the night. She hasn’t been THERE, for sure.

Focus on *YOUR* strengths and good qualities. List them mentally, if you have to. Over and Over. As the walls of reality close in on you and you feel increasingly embarrassed and inadequate… remind yourself of how WELL you would be ROCKING THIS if it were in YOUR arena. Remind yourself how WELL you’re gonna rock it if/when all this Bourgeoisie $*#& ends and it comes down to you vs her, one on one, in PRIVATE… YA HEARD? :D

Hold your head and weather the storm… Knowing that regardless of how far behind on the count you are, you’re gonna keep hitting fouls until you get that one pitch you need to smash it out of the park! :D

~ Bill Cammack

Social Media Spoilers

Bill Cammack — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 16:37:52 +0000

So I just ruined an experience for my friend Keith when I posted a Facebook status update about who won the Carano vs Cyborg fight last night. That’s my fault, and I hate it when that happens to me… Except it brings up an interesting point about the real-time nature of the internet these days.

I already know to avoid *ALL* areas of Social Media between the time that something happens that I recorded on my DVR and the time that I watch it. For instance… If I intend to watch an episode of “24″ and it airs at 9pm EST and I don’t want to hear anyone spoil it for me, I’m not going to look at Google, eMail, Social Media sites, Instant Messenger programs, my own blog or ANYTHING ELSE until I watch the episode.

This is because this is 2009. People are LIVE-BLOGGING events at this point. I’m sure you could have hit Google ten minutes after the fight concluded and found the results, the exact time the fight ended, how it ended, who won and people’s opinions about the entire thing. By the next morning, you can see pictures of the event as well as video from the post-fight interviews.

So, I DVRed the fight just like Keith did… The difference is that the *FIRST* thing I did when I woke up was watch the fight, because I couldn’t possibly have started my Social Media day in good conscience without clearing my desk of things that I didn’t want to be prematurely made aware of.

Also, Keith asked me about a spoiler warning. Technically, he’s right about that. In reality, the Cyborg/Carano fight ended sometime before 1am EST. I posted about it at 10am EST, nine (9) hours later. In fact, that was THREE HOURS after I commented about it on my own blog post on my site. So, while I considered myself deliberately delaying discussing it on Facebook, Keith felt like I discussed it too early, and I understand why he feels that way.

Unfortunately, this very situation is why newspapers are going out of business. The time it takes them to report the news is too long. I found out via Twitter from a woman who speaks French and lives in NYC that there was an earthquake in Tokyo and emailed my homegirl Masami who lives over there to see if she was ok.

That’s how we’re livin’ now… In real-time. So, while *I* felt like I was sitting on information for AGES and AGES before posting about it to Facebook, Keith, who lives some kind of normal-person life, was counting on everybody that he follows on every Social Media site he’s a part of to not talk about Carano/Cyborg until he got around to watching it, OR to have the courtesy to put the word “spoiler” in media they create an entire 1/3 day after the event actually occurred.

So the question becomes.. How long until something’s no longer a “spoiler”?

How long after Chris Brown kicks his girlfriend’s ass are you supposed to wait before you discuss it on Twitter or Facebook without calling it a spoiler? How long do you wait after finding out that an EARTHQUAKE hit your homegirl’s city to check to see if she’s ok? How long do you wait to say “I told y’all this chick was going to kick this other chick’s ass” when the information had already been available on the internet for NINE HOURS before you no longer need to label it ***spoiler***?

~Bill | @BillCammack

She’s Got A Boyfriend

Bill Cammack — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 12:09:23 +0000

I wish I could remember how many MILLIONS of times I’ve had this EXACT interaction with chicks when I see some girl arrive that they already know:

Me: Who’s That?
Her: She’s got a boyfriend.
Me: That’s not what I asked you.
Her: …..
Me: Who’s That?

It’s REALLY effin’ INCREDIBLE how many chicks are programmed to insert their own agenda into a conversation. Pay attention to what I asked you. What makes you think “She’s got a boyfriend” is a legitimate response to the question “Who’s That?”?

Could you mind your own business and give me the information if you have it? If you don’t have it, say so. You obviously have it if you know enough of her business to be aware of whether she has a boyfriend or not. It’s completely amazing.

Then, when you ask them again and look at them like they’re retarded and must have failed all of the Reading Comprehension sections on their English tests in school, they look at *YOU* as if *YOU* didn’t understand what they just said.

Check it out, ladies… The answer to “Is the glass half full?” is not “The grass is green”. Capisce?

Jeez! :D

~Bill | @BillCammack

10 Warning Signs That You Should Dump His Ass

Bill Cammack — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 14:19:24 +0000

Lindsey Chen (@LindseyChen) & Bill Cammack (@BillCammack)

Lindz & Bill present 10 Warning Signs That You Should Dump His Ass!

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Lindsey & Bill: Does He Want To Be Friends?
Morning-After Conduct

Lots of times… Sometimes evidenced in this very blog, hehe.. Women stay in relationships that they would be better off getting out of.

In some cases, it’s not obvious to them what’s going on, but in others, their Significant Other is waving these gigantic red flags at them that they either refuse to see or are unable to recognize for some reason.

As usual, it’s Lindz & Bill to the rescue, with ten warning signs that should make y’all go “HMMMMMMMMMM…..”. Let us know what you think in the comments section, below…

Lindz

1. He books a trip home to see his parents and when he calls you, he says “Actually I’ve decided to stay… um.. indefinitely.”

To me, this says, “I don’t really give a $^#% about you, or what you think. All I care about is myself.” He doesn’t even bother to discuss it with you or see how you feel. Mind you, it IS his decision ultimately, but come on, man… be respectful and courteous. I’ll give it to him that he may be stressed or frustrated over something, which may or may not have something to do with you, but is that how he deals with his issues? Just ups and leaves? Well, do yourself a favor and leave this loser.

2. He’s too self-conscious or insecure to meet your friends or introduce you to his.

If even HE thinks he’s a loser, then why would YOU want to waste your time on him? He obviously has more issues than just being insecure – He has low self-esteem and doesn’t think he’s worth meeting your amazingly cool friends. And you’re way too awesome to have to deal with this baggage. If he doesn’t think he’s worth it, then you definitely shouldn’t either. DUMP HIS ASS.

3. He forgets about your Birthday / Anniversary / Valentine’s Day.

A good guy will never forget about these holidays. Whether you care about them or not, he should show that he appreciates you for who you are. If he forgets them, someone better have died, because otherwise it just shows that he doesn’t prioritize his relationship over other things in his life. What? Is he too into playing WOW and forgot that it was your birthday IRL? In the future, how is he going to show his appreciation if he can’t even remember what day is your birthday? LOSER.

4. He never has money to pay for his share when you go out.

Note: I said HIS SHARE, not even the whole bill – I get it that we’re in the 21st Century, and a lot of the times, it’s common for guys and girls to go 50/50. I’m talking about those guys that expect YOU to foot the bill. EXCUSE ME? This is the first warning sign of a loser who isn’t financially responsible for himself and chooses not to take care of himself. Last I checked you weren’t his babysitter. You better dump his ass before he starts asking you for his weekly allowance.

5. He treats his family like $^#% and makes up excuses as to why they don’t get along. I.E. He’s too good for them.

If he believes that its OK to treat his family – his own flesh and blood – like crap, how do you think he feels about treating you? He obviously doesn’t think there is anything wrong with that and with the right situation to piss him off, he’s like an atom bomb waiting to explode. Just make sure that you’re not around to reap the repercussions.

Bill

6. Having a girlfriend isn’t as important to him as having a boyfriend is to you.

Lots of times, dudes are just getting laid. Period. It doesn’t really have anything to do with YOU, personally. A girlfriend = guaranteed sex, and that’s about it. If it’s not personal with you, you can be easily replaced by any OTHER chick that wants to have sex with him on the regular and isn’t going to be too much of a PITA in the meantime. Keep those lines of communication open so you can tell whether he’s having the same relationship to you that you’re having to him.

7. He doesn’t consider any of your opinions to be valid.

Do you ever get that feeling when you make suggestions that your man’s playing you off like Keyboard Cat?

That’s a beauty pageant, not a spelling bee. That chick wasn’t selected for her mind. She was selected for her looks and her body. Similarly, if that’s why YOU were hired, and your man really doesn’t give a damn what you say or think, don’t expect to have MORE respect in the future. You’ll most likely have LESS, being that you’re no longer in school, your brain isn’t getting any exercise, because nobody discusses intelligent topics with you and the education you DID receive in school is now outdated. If this is you… get a new boyfriend who respects you or at least is willing to pretend that he does.

8. He’s always getting numbers / still active on that dating site you met him on.

Remember when you met him and you shut down your account and you stopped returning emails from dudes and you stopped checking how many winks you got today? :D hahaha Well, Keep an eye on your man’s account, because if it’s still active, you might not be “all that” and he might be preparing to trade you in for the next best chick. If you’d like to know for sure, make a fake account, send him a wink/message and see if he takes the bait…..

9. He doesn’t treat you differently from any other chick.

If you’re REALLY his girlfriend, you should be able to list the perks that you get for having that title. If you can’t differentiate between how your man treats YOU vs. how he treats other chicks, you might not be Ms. Right. You might be Mrs. Right Now! :D Ask him for something that should be easy for him to do, like… I don’t know….. kiss you in public?….. hehehe If you can’t get that, he may very well be preserving his game with the next chick, since her friends might be in the same room with you, or maybe she’s there herself.

10. You have access to his ex-girlfriends and knowledge of how THEIR relationships ended up.

Ladies… Please… Seriously… :D If you see how some dude dogged females in the past, PLEASE use that information to make educated decisions about messing with him or trying to be his girlfriend. I’m sure that every single one of them thought that they were as fly as YOU think YOU are right now. Every one of them ended up as *EX-GIRLFRIENDS* too, so get a clue.

Lindz|@LindseyChen & Bill|@BillCammack

Bill Cammack

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

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Lindz

1. He Wants to Keep His Options Open

2. He’d Rather Hang Out With His Guy Friends Than Be Obligated To You

3. The Holidays Are Coming Up And He’s Broke.

4. You’re Way Hotter Than Him and He’s Insecure That You’ll Leave Him

5. You’re Damaged Goods (Bros Before Hoes)

Bill

6. He Doesn’t Want To Hit It

7. You Can’t Handle It

8. HE Can’t Handle It

9. Your Friendship or Business Is More Important

10. You Have Lots Of Attractive Girlfriends

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