Edit: I was just feeling glum because someone I respect wrote something I wish were true, which I do not believe is true. I don’t feel like I was able to fully express my thoughts on this.

Full disclosure: Bing is an advertiser on this site, yet BlueBlood.net does not on the first dozen pages of search results for a search on Blue Blood. SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is internet professional lingo for the process by which someone expert in this area would attempt to fix Bing’s search results so they would no longer be defective in this regard.

I’ve been really bummed out all day because of something Derek Powazek wrote. (Also, I made the mistake of watching this week’s brilliant but melancholy Mad Men on TiVo to snap myself out of it. Doh.) Halcyon first turned me on to Derek Powazek’s writing. Derek Powazek tends to write useful articles about how to make good web sites. He has an engaging style and manages to speak clear tech talk. I think we shook hands once at an event, but we do not know each other; I’m just a fan.

Entertainment industry professionals always used to joke with me and Forrest Black about Blue Blood in print being the “trade mag of cool”, maybe because we always found the next big thing and provided contact info. I suppose I’d be wildly wealthy today if I’d just marketed myself as a consultant and charged quite a bit more for that data than the price of a magazine. My focus, however, was just on making a good magazine. One of the coolest things about making a magazine, versus making a website, is that I could just mail anyone I thought was cool a free one. I never felt like I needed fancy press releases. I could just show what I created to people I respected and hope they liked it. I didn’t know it until years too late for this to be useful to me, but Blue Blood was far and away the highest circulation magazine in its niche. So I guess that all worked just fine, in some respects. But, for a web site, this becomes a lot more challenging because previously normal human journalists may freak out that they are being spammed when sent a press release, as opposed to physical freebies.

Here is where Derek Powazek’s “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists” article really depressed me. His advice is to never SEO (see the witty title there). His article states that SEO does not work and also, because it works temporarily, it clogs up search engine results. (I think he should pick which is the problem.) He directs his readers to avoid making sites for Google and just make good web sites for one’s readers and tell people you know personally about them.

So here is why the “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists” article really upset me. The whole time I was growing up, it was drummed into me that I absolutely had to get good grades and go to good schools, so I could get a good job and a good life. Okay, both my parents went to Harvard and I went to Wesleyan, but Wes is still one of the top universities in the country on all ranking lists. And that paired with a hot suit will get me a job as a nonsexual escort. Escorting is actually the only job I’ve ever done which required me to have an advanced education. As writing about that job for Hustler’s Chic got me my first non-music glossy magazine clip, I supposed I’ve arguably gotten two jobs for all those years of school. Kind of a sucky ROI.

But I digress. The point is that I was told to just work hard and do what I was supposed to do and I would be rewarded. And I fucking well wasn’t. So it upsets me being told once again that I need to just work hard and do what I’m supposed to do and I will be rewarded. I mean, I still do that because it’s just how I am wired at this point. Like the characters on Mad Men, there is a thin patina of mild disappointment on a lot of my experiences, but I no longer get wildly, dramatically, heart-breakingly disappointed, because I stopped believing my reward was just around the corner and would be given just for making something good which people liked.

In point of fact, for example, I work very hard on making BlueBlood.com a good site. But I spend my time creating and publishing content the readers will enjoy, not optimizing for Google or Yahoo or Bing. BlueBlood.com never makes the front page of Google for a freaking search for Blue Blood. This makes doing radio and TV shows much less beneficial than it should be. That site has actually only received 844 visits from Google total this month. And 143 of those were people searching for specifically blueblood.com. I don’t get why someone would type that into a search engine, but the point is that just working hard and doing good work are absolutely not enough. I would love it if someone from Google could explain why the heck that site is never indexed properly. Thank goodness I have extensive traffic resources outside of what search engines provide. And I work hard on those too. It makes me viscerally angry to see Twitter lighting up with venture capital rich tech gurus saying everyone else should just work hard, tell their friends they’re working on cool stuff, and sit around waiting for something good to happen. The Underpants Gnomes on South Park have a waaaaay better business plan.

I like to do the right thing and I enjoy working hard. But I am well aware that I pay a heavy price for the luxury of doing what I feel is the right thing on the road less traveled. And I am sick to death of being advised to keep doing the same thing while expecting different results.

Blasphemy Day is a new internet-spawned holiday like Talk Like a Pirate Day or CAPS LOCK DAY. I’m not surprised that more people added typing like a pirate to their holiday calendars than typing in all capital letters, but I would have thought more people would have gotten into Blasphemy Day.

Blasphemy Day is set for September 30, as a tip of the hat to the riots caused when a Danish newspaper ran a cartoon of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. According to the anonymously-run Blasphemy Day web site, “International Blasphemy Day is not just a day. It is a movement to dismantle the wall which exists between religion and criticism . . . The objective of International Blasphemy Day is to open up all religious beliefs to the same level of free inquiry, discussion and criticism to which all other areas of academic interest are subjected.” Noble aspiration, although I’m not sure a mean-spirited cartoon really advances human knowledge. Slaying sacred cows can be humorous (Heck, even the existence of the idiomatic expression sacred cow is pretty funny), but I have yet to hear anyone explain what the joke was in the Danish Muhammad cartoon, except maybe that it would piss people off.

I used to feel like each person’s individual relationship with their deity or deities or lack thereof was . . . well, personal. I am a fan of analysis and critical thinking, but I pretty much don’t discuss religion. I lived in Israel as a teenager and all major religions go there for debate. Or it being the cradle of three of the major modern religions. Or something like that. While living there, someone I knew complained to me about an agnostic debating him on his Christianity. He said he felt it was wrong for someone undecided to try to convince him that his religion was predicated on something he couldn’t be sure of because, if the undecided agnostic won the debate, they would have stolen his faith. His position was that his faith was valuable to him and being undecided meant nothing to the agnostic. I just did a quick Bing on the person who said that and he apparently is still losing and rediscovering his faith on a regular basis, so maybe he was actually the agnostic. Whether or not the person, who made the point on the value of faith for the believer, was an idiot probably doesn’t make the point invalid.

But then I lived in Georgia. And that totally changed my views on religious tolerance. I experienced countless people who considered themselves religious use their status as a person of faith to behave in incredibly bigoted ways towards those around them. Including me. I literally had door-to-door religion salesmen defecate on my porch. I had bakers ask me if I drank baby’s blood when I was trying to buy a bagel. (No, I eat bagels. Duh.) I had come across bigots before, but I’d never seen this level of intolerant, assumption-making, busy-body, beating-down of anybody different. I had a pretty normal punk reaction to Southern oppression in that it made me want to jump up and down on the tables, yell, and rebel. Blasphemy became utterly hilarious to me.

While kind of doing the couch tour in between Atlanta and Los Angeles, Forrest Black registered the domain BarelyEvil.com. (Do not click that link if you are at work, unless your office is totally cool with viewing naked blasphemers while on the clock.) He was amused by the idea of satanic teens and I’m a big fan of putting a site on a domain, once it is registered, so Forrest Black built Blue Blood’s Barely Evil, and we did kind of a lot of shoots involving crosses, fetish nuns, and devil girls. They were fun and creative. BarelyEvil takes a light-hearted approach to the subject matter. You can see a free devil girl gallery Forrest Black and I shot here and both those full series, in all their glory, are available in the Blue Blood VIP members area. We’ve shot a lot of different styles of devilgirls, but we did this style first with Dana Dark and later of Szandora, Scar 13, Masuimi Max, Lori the Gory, and Nina Sin, among others.

So, is blasphemy funny or mean, uncalled-for or needed, or some gray area combo of the above? Is slaughtering sacred cows a good thing or is the very expression “slaughtering sacred cows” hate speech? Are you ready to celebrate Blasphemy Day?

The brilliant Ellen Von Unwerth shot an extensive pictorial of Lady Gaga in vampire drag for Out. The exclusive Out feature is called The Lady is a Vamp. The shoot styling is credited to someone named Nicola Formichetti who is seriously talented and who Bing informs me is the creative director of Dazed and Confused and is responsible for some of the fashion in Vogue Hommes Japan, V, Arena Homme, and others, as well as of course out. Always fun to discover the work of creative people I have not come across before.

Out calls Lady Gaga “Pop’s newest — and gayest — superstar”. One of the things I like about Lady Gaga is that I feel she is someone post-orientation in her approach to sexuality. She has stated often in interviews that she is attracted to women physically but only has romantic relationships with men. I’m not sure if that makes her super-gay, but maybe I am just feeling cantankerous today about people being so bent on labeling sexuality. I do not feel that an individual’s sexuality generally belongs in a tidy little box with a label stickered on it.

Then again, from an editorial perspective, I’m pleased that Out indentifies Lady Gaga as gay, however she defines herself. Because this gave Out reason to publish a beautiful portfolio of images of Lady Gaga shot by Ellen Von Unwerth. They did a ton of different set-ups and have both black and white and color and a whole spectrum of spooky themes. Lots of vampire and gothic tropes photographed appealingly. Smoky dark eyes, coffin, sunglasses at night, blood, nudity (probably sfw nudity) fangs, and cute skeleton in combat boots. Definitely worth checking out.