David McElroy

Briefly: Search engines are dumbing down online writing

By David McElroy · April 3, 2019

It’s scary that search engines are driving how digital content is written today. If you want the things you write to be found by more folks online, you have to consider what’s called “search engine optimization.” Experts in SEO can tell you how to rank more highly in Google searches, but they have nothing to say about connecting with real people with insights that matter. I want to do technical things such as make my pages load faster, but I don’t want to change what I’m writing so that a search engine will like it more. By the standards promoted by these SEO experts, none of the great books which have influenced me over the years would have been written (or discovered). Something is wrong with culture when software developers and geeks drive writing more than writers and thinkers.

Nightmarish dreams mean dead can continue to play mind games

By David McElroy · April 2, 2019

My dreams have become nightmares lately — and I don’t know why.

Both of my dead parents showed up in dreams last night. My father was trying to manipulate me. My mother was abandoning me. It’s as though both were playing the ugly roles I expected from them.

It was as though something in me was using their departed images to taunt me — as though something was pointing an accusing finger and saying, “See? Nobody really loves you. You don’t deserve to be loved.”

There was even a basketball game later in the dream at which I was turning blue — and I felt shame at people seeing me like this when I had come to see a woman — but I’ll start with my parents.

Briefly: Take a look at brief recap of my site redesign

By David McElroy · April 1, 2019

If you haven’t already seen it, please be sure to take a look at the five-minute video that I posted over the weekend about my recent site redesign. I had talked about it for months and then it was a messy transition, but things are finally as they ought to be. Click here to watch my brief ramble on the subject if you’re interested.

It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

The Republican Party is dead. It still exists in name, of course, but it’s nothing but a shell. All that’s left are idiots and stooges and con men of the MAGA party. When Donald Trump is gone — which won’t be long — those populist idiots and pragmatic fools will have no one to follow. Democrats will thrive. They will take more power than ever and they will push the federal government further to the radical far left than ever. When that happens, don’t just blame Trump if you’re a conservative. Blame every person who has claimed to be a conservative and has given up on principles, character and everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for. As someone who worked as a GOP political consultant for many years, this is disgusting and disturbing to me. Those who have enabled Trump to have almost unchecked power are going to be shocked when they see what they will unleash in the long run. It’s been plain all along what this narcissistic con man is. It’s your fault that you chose to pretend not to see what he really is.

We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.