I’m fairly used to all the Viagra and Porn spam that comes through. That stuff is like the bread and butter of a spam sandwich. But here recently I’ve been getting some really strange religious spam. The funny thing is, they don’t even link to religiously appropriate websites. In fact, I actually found the links to be VERY ironic.

Here are some examples, followed by my commentary:

With a link to an antique shop:
“These prayers help me to keep God in my life, especially with the many distractions I encounter.”
(Yes all those things are… ooh wait an antique shop!!!)

With a link to some cigar website:
“I praise God for answering my prayers. God, you are so wonderful, majestic. Jesus Christ, I adore Your Sacred Heart.”
(What the heck kind of cigars are these?) @.@

With a link selling Cialis (an ED Drug):
“This website is very nice and colorful too. Its nice to have something to show others where you attend church and to show all the smiling people filled of the goodness of the Lord. You have a wonderful website here. May God rich bless you always.”
(You want to go where? and show off your what?? and fill them with WHAT???)

With a link pertaining to cyber sex:
“I have always wanted a compendium of novena prayers. Thank you for sharing all these prayers with us. It brings joy and happiness to everyone. I know, I do feel that way.e”
(You spent how many days on your knees… praying for what?)
***The definition of a Novena might clarify the irony.

And there are more, but I think you get the point.

Now, I know that as a rule, we as bloggers are supposed to ignore spam altogether. Just delete it and move on. However, I found these particular examples of spam to be particularly humorous and as such decided to share. Thank you, you crazy spam bot, you really made my day. For once, I’m glad I got some spam. Normally sorting through and deleting my spam is an annoying task. This time, I enjoyed it immensely.

God Bless Spam.
Spam Bless You.

Type to you later,
~Nathaniel

“Hello, Im a fourty year old man that has been diognosed with A.D.D.. I have been on Aderall for four years. Prior to that I was an alcoholic and drug addict. I have tried just about every med available in the last few months trying to get out of the zombie stage. I decided to stop all meds two weeks ago. I have not felt this good in a long time. I am concerned becase I feel myself not being content with what I have and I worry about the old me returning. Do you know of anything that might take the edge off and yet not make me a zombie? I am trying excercise and diet but I feel myself getting board… Thanks Cory”

I totally understand. It was a rough transition for me to kick the meds, but it was well worth it. You’re right, you feel great in comparison to all those drugs slowing you down. You are right though,it is easy to get bored and distracted without any chemicals to keep your brain on a leash. I do have a few suggestions though:

1. Coffee/Tea. I can’t drink either because the caffeine makes me pass out. However, I know plenty of people who have ADD and survive just fine on two cups of coffee a day (one at breakfast and one at lunch). You do have to watch out for the crash afterwards though, it’s just something to keep in mind.
2. Chocolate, also contains caffeine. If I find that I need to focus, I’ll often snag a piece of chocolate. The sugar and caffeine helps to get my brain moving in the right direction again.
3. Meditation. It’s boring as… well… just sitting there for long periods of time. However, the discipline garnered from training your mind to shut up and be quiet is priceless. I use both meditation and self hypnosis techniques to get myself to sleep every night. As I’m sure you know, many who suffer from ADD also find it hard to sleep because their minds just won’t stop thinking.
4. Martial arts. Working out and eating right is great, but you don’t train your mind much with just that. Keeping your brain engaged and forcing some discipline on yourself with martial arts can be extremely helpful. Even something like Tae Bow (which is just the kung fu / kick boxing workout taken from the martial art) can be extremely beneficial.
5. Stay away from additive/preservatives. There is some scientific evidence and a wealth of anecdotal evidence to support the claim that ADD is caused by these artificial chemicals in our food. Although I’m not entirely sure if I believe this, it isn’t a bad idea to at least keep in mind that these artificial additives/preservatives and colorings are probably not good for you. I’m not saying “go all natural”. But rather that you try not to eat/drink overly fake/processed food. Here’s a link to some of these findings:
   http://www.chem-tox.com/pregnancy/artificial.htm

Well, that about sums it up. I hope that was helpful. Keep in mind, I’m not a doctor and the consumption of caffeine and chocolate may be contraindicated for other conditions (such as hypertension, high blood pressure, and diabetes). Not to mention the dangers of martial arts. I’m not giving medical advice, just sharing what works for me. (heh, just covering my butt).

Type to you later,
~Nathaniel Summers

P.S. Thank you Cory, for allowing me to post this here as well. I sincerely hope that this dialog was helpful to both you and any others with similar situations who happen to stumble upon this post.

As an inviatation to my readers, if you have any comments, and especially if you have any more suggestions for managing ADD without medication, please, by all means, leave a comment below.

Now, why the heck does this matter to anyone?

Well, I’m working on an experiment. I’ve heard that facebook is a great way to drive traffic to websites, if done properly. I’ve got little blurbs about this and my other two sites up there at the moment. I also uploaded several pieces of my artwork and posted a link to this in the gallery description saying that I’ve got more here. On top of that, the items that I sell on t-shirts, I’ve got links to their product pages.

Facebook Seems like it was
practically made for artists!

I knew facebook was popular but I had no idea. I can totally see how much potential it has for connecting people. Because of the way it works, it’s perfect for visual artists. I’ve said it once, and I’ll probably say it a thousand times: getting traffic to your site (and eyeballs on your art) is all about increasing your presence on the web. People can only view your work if they know you’re there! Facebook looks to me like a great way to get exposure. At the very least, it will keep you in touch with your friends, and your friends in touch with you… and your art. Some of my best customers (and by that I mean they buy a lot of stuff ^_^) are friends and family. Let’s face it, we could all use more friends.

Let’s recap

As an artist you can build your traffic very simply by getting a facebook account, staying in touch with friends and family, uploading samples of your artwork with links back to your website (for if they want to see more).

Question for the artistic masses:

“Do you use Facebook? Do you use it to build you traffic for your site and get eyeballs on your art? If so, how successful is it?”
I’m very interested to see how others are doing with this. I’ll keep everyone updated on my results with facebook advertising.

Hope that was helpful,
Type to you later,
~Nathaniel

So how do you attract these eyeballs? There are a vast array of methods that are free, fast, and easy to set up. The first I’m going to mention is social art gallery sites. Here are a few that work very well for not only generating traffic but for also serving as your main gallery website:

www.elfwood.com is a fantasy and science fiction specific gallery community for both artists and writers. There are also a great deal of tutorial pages and a host of communities built around elfwood. The main thing people have a problem with is the genre restriction. However, it’s still a very awesome community and well worth your time if your particular genre of interest happens to be fantasy or science fiction.

www.deviantart.com is a site for artists from every genre. They also have a nice feature where you can pay a monthly fee and be able to sell relatively high quality prints of your work. They’re also HUGE, so you can get a lot of organic traffic through them.

www.flickr.com isn’t specifically for artists, but I have seen artists use them specifically because of the high amount of traffic that runs through flickr.

Now, I’m sure your asking “Why the heck should I use all these different gallery sites when I’ve got a gallery of my own?”… Well, do a quick search for “Nathaniel Summers” on google and you’ll find that this site isn’t listed in the top few pages. However, the #1 result is my elfwood gallery. (huh… I guess I need to brand my name a bit better here. :P )

These sites allow you to increase your web “footprint” such that you’re MUCH more visible on the web. They also allow you to get feedback on your work through comprehensive commenting systems. This makes these galleries as much about community as they are about the art.

Indeed, using community sites to build traffic is a time-tested technique that works every time to generate organic, targeted, and absolutely real traffic.

the best advice that I have for anyone trying to increase traffic on any website is to get out there and participate in the online community as a whole. Going and commenting on blogs, people’s art galleries, their myspace photos, just about anything. You can’t lose. Now, I’m not saying that you should spam, just get out there, be present and participate. You’ll gain a lot of nice targeted organic traffic this way.

My question for my readers today is: “What is your most successful method for generating traffic for an art-related site?”

However, there is a way to stop a sneeze without causing damage. You have to stop it before it starts. It is possible to simply relax, clear your mind, and concentrate on stopping the involuntary spasm that is a sneeze, however, that’s not very reliable and its not easy to summon the will power to subdue something as powerful as a sneeze. Imagine that you’re an international super spy, you’re on a stealth mission, you’re in someone’s office trying to steal top secret plans and as you open up the drawer to the desk your nose begins to itch, then tingle and you sneeze. This alerts the guards outside who promptly rush into the room and shoot you in the face, mission over. Oops! I sneezed!

It’s actually really easy to stop a sneeze. Just one conveniently easy pressure point will do the trick. That’s right, all you have to do is take your index and middle finger and press them to the little indention that your super-orbital ridge (your eyebrow bones) make where they meet just above your nose (between and slightly above the eyebrows).

If you trace your eyebrows with your fingers you can feel the bones. You want to press right where they join up with the forehead. The bones form a shape that’s almost like a “W” that will perfectly fit two fingers. I’ve provided the illustration to help… well, illustrate this.

Now, I’ve got to lay out a few things. This pressure point will stop most sneezes. However, it won’t stop all sneezes, including:

• Those brought on by high concentrations of irritants (such as pepper up the nose).
• Those caused by extreme allergy attacks (such as sneezing fits that last several minuets).
• A sneeze that’s right about to happen.

It’s also very important that you catch the sneeze early. If you wait too long to apply the pressure point, it won’t work. Upon applying the pressure to this point, you should immediately stop feeling like you have to sneeze. If you can still feel the sneeze building up, get your fingers away from your face before you poke your eye out.

I personally use this technique all the time. Sneezes actually do serve a purpose, so I use it sparingly. I tend to use this when I’m on the phone, with a customer at work, when I’m trying to be sneaky, etc…

Give it a shot, you’ll be amazed at how well it works.

What is trafficjam? It’s a content rating site much like Digg and Stumbleupon. However, the rankings are figured out by a combination of the click-through rate of posts in the BlogRush widget and the amount of time they spend on that page. Apparently it’s a big complicated algorithm that figures out just how popular an article is. What is means is that these little blogs can pull in traffic like the big guys.

Trafficjam has just launched and it’s getting MASSIVE amounts of traffic already. This traffic is then being funneled to the most popular blog entries from BlogRush users all over the planet. BlogRush not only gives you the ability to increase your exposure by putting links to your content all over the web, If you’re content is popular, it could potentially expose it to thousands every day! BlogRush has never looked better. If you’re a blog owner, there is NO REASON not to join.

Join BlogRush today, and start driving targeted traffic to your blog TODAY!

Also, bookmark trafficjam.com and view it often. Why? Because you can see very quickly what headlines are generating clickthroughs and what topics are hot. Write an article about a similar topic, link to hot posts, use similar headline strategies and you could drastically increase your clickthrough rates and your subscribers. TrafficJam is a priceless headline, content, and keyword research tool.

The dehydrating qualities of caffeine where somehow kept from me in my youth. My assumption was “if I’m thirsty, I should get a drink” Apparently, however, the type of drink is VERY important.

One day back in high school I guess I was a little dehydrated and feeling thirsty so I decided to get a drink. However I didn’t know that a coke would neither parch that thirst nor get me any less dehydrated. As stated before, the caffeine in coke is a dehydrant (it dehydrates you). Because of this, I got more dehydrated and thusly more thirsty. This produced a vicious cycle that I would soon regret because before I realized it, I had drank an entire 12 pack of coke in about 2 hours.

So what happens to a kid who has consumed 12 times the recommended daily intake of sugar and that much dehydrating, blood pressure increasing caffeine? Well, let me first state that I am no doctor, so I can’t really say that I blame Coke for what happened to me, the last thing I need is a law suit for defaming a huge corporation. In any case This is the sequence of events as they happened to me:

1. My increased blood pressure was obviously too much for the capillaries in my nose. They burst and I began to bleed profusely from my nose.
2. I actually lost quite a bit of blood and the fact that I’m actually very hemophobic (afraid of blood) caused me to actually pass out.
3. While unconscious, I went into convulsions. Nothing too violent, but I did claw a chunk out of my face, push all the air out of my lungs as all the muscles in my body contracted causing me to somewhat thrash around enough to give me a couple bruises.
4. Also while unconscious, I had the most amazing hallucination. I got to become the universe without time. Somehow, I was aware of everything in the universe all at once. Too bad it was really all in my head… and my brain can’t comprehend the sheer amount of data. Because knowing everything would be pretty cool.
5. Upon waking up a mere 30 seconds later (although it felt like an eternity… because… well… the no time thing) I felt like I was being electrocuted. Having been exposed to live wires many times throughout my life, I know the feeling well.
6. I had apparently gone through quite a workout because I was dripping in sweat.
7. Up until about 3 hours afterwards, my sense of equilibrium was shot. In fact, if I moved my head at all, I would feel like both myself and the whole world where spinning out of control.
8. After I dragged myself to bed, I slept for about 14-15 hours and still felt anemic the entire next day.

Now, I have to mention that I have passed out and had hallucinations simply from the sight of blood. That pesky hemophobia is to blame for that one. Still, I have NEVER experienced ANYTHING quite as traumatic from a simple nose bleed before. From then on, I have sworn off caffeine almost entirely. It really isn’t very good for you at all. It has been suggested that caffeine may cause a number of ailments from hypertension to wrinkles. Like most things, it can be good for you in small amounts. However, large amounts should certainly be avoided.

My advice to everyone is to lay off the caffeinated beverages compltely. I used to drink them because I believed I needed them to keep me awake (I’m a very sleepy person by nature). But I must admit, I have a ton more energy than I did when I was drinking caffeinated drinks all the time. On top of that, I don’t have to drink one every few hours just to keep from crashing. I was chemically dependent upon the drug known as caffeine for a long time. If I went for a day without it, I would get migraines and be so anxious and antsy that I would (out of habit) check the fridge every few hours even though I knew we where out. I’ve got to say, I’m so glad I kicked it. I sleep better, I feel more awake when I am awake, I’ve had far fewer nose bleeds, and I just feel better since kicking that coke monkey to the curb. Also, I’ve begun to notice that because I’m not addicted to my soft drink of choice, sprite, I don’t drink nearly as much soda as I used to. My teeth, my bones, my heart, my liver and my brain will thank me in the long run.

Even so, feel free to get in there, check out my artwork, and leave some comments to try out the new system.

You see, my wife often complains about the odor produced by my bowel movements. In fact, the restroom is generally off limits as a biohazard zone for quite some time afterwards. I understand this is also a problem for many other men. Generally speaking all the females I’ve known are completely repelled by the odor produced by male feces. They tend to avoid it like the plague, spray all manner of odor eliminators and scents in an effort to cover it up, and make funny faces while rebuking the source of the odor.

With this in mind, I sat down to think about what I could do to help ease my wife’s olfactory discomfort. Because it is often difficult for anyone to wait several hours for the stink to clear before they can use the toilet, I decided that it might be more considerate to wait until just after my wife uses the toilet to “take the browns to the super bowl”.

Judging by both common sense and anecdotal evidence, we can all agree that people tend to relieve themselves every few hours and are thusly unlikely to need to use the toilet within a few hours of relieving themselves. By waiting until my wife has just used the toilet to “drop the kids off at the pool” I can maximize the amount of time that the air has to clear before next she must visit the restroom, thusly sparing her from as much of my foul reek as possible. I find this to be the most considerate course of actions possible. It’s also very easy to do so long as there happens to be no immediate urgency to your situation.

As an additional benefit, because a woman must always sit in order to use the toilet, using the toilet right after her ensures that the seat is nice, warm, and ready for your posterior. The only exception is when your wife is a germ-aphobe who simply “hovers.” However, baring that one exception, this situation will likely be the same across the board. I must admit, I do not miss the cold seat, and although my wife thinks I’m a bit of a jerk to specifically wait for her to “warm up the seat” for me, she does appreciate the less frequent assault on her nostrils.

Someone once said that marriage is about compromise. I think this is a perfect example of this. There are obvious benefits for both parties and very little effort is required to reap these benefits. Because of this, I’ve got a new rule for toilet etiquette: if at all possible, wait until directly after my wife has used the toilet to “take a dump”. By sparing her of my noxious fumes, I am rewarded with a freshly warmed seat. Seems fair enough to me.

Pretty much everything is super-optimized and low poly with very detailed textures. Most of the simple objects are just planes (like the trees and the windows). Everything else is simple geometry. It was a ton of fun. I’m really starting to get the hang of this stuff. I really just can’t wait until I can score a job in the game production industry. I really am itching to create something that I can actually play.