teh internets iz mek meh stoopit

A major part of my job consists of surfing the web in search of the latest interactive marketing trends. It’s a lot more draining than one would think. Sure, there’s a lot of cool stuff out there, but day after month after year of surfing has shrunk my attention span to that of an ADD-afflicted first-grader. I sometimes worry that this has made me a bit blind to trends that have yet to be tested on the Czech market but seem to be successful elsewhere, especially in the west.

Another part of the problem is that the Czech ad and interactive marketing agencies suffer from a lack of originality and creativity. Most, if not all, of the proposals that come through our team’s inboxes are Czech-ified versions of innovative western online advertising executions. It’s as if the creatives have resigned themselves to the fact that the online ad industry has hit a plateau and now the game’s all a matter of style over substance. Attempts are being made at viral and 2.0 marketing ploys, using flash games, widgets, videos, fake personal websites and fake profiles on social networking sites, targeted seeding, and messageboard lurking (or planting? The jargon escapes me). Surveys are conducted, results are analyzed, but a handful of web users, whether beginner or advanced, casual or hardcore, simply cannot ensure the success or failure of an interactive marketing execution.

That challenge provides stimulation for the work I do. At the same time I suffer from a kind of tunnel vision I’ve developed as web surfer. I ignore about 99% of all banner ads – the last one to interest me enough to prompt a click-through was Microsoft’s Rabbit Rescue banner for Office 2007. The video it led me to is entertaining (see below), but did it prompt me to buy the product? No, not really. I was going to buy it anyway, so all the ad did was make me eager to buy it.

Flash games are fun, but I get bored with them after a couple of minutes (though a good first-person shooter would keep my attention for a bit longer). The only video site I browse thoroughly is ebaumsworld.com because they specialize in the kinds of videos that I go through like potato chips – mainly people fighting and doing incredibly stupid shit and getting hurt. Sure, it’s morbid, but sometimes I like to test my tolerance. I don’t pass on most of the videos I watch since I don’t particularly like it when people pass stuff on to me, the videos that I get spammed with tend to be either too twee or too vulgar (I have my limits) for my tastes. So I’ve lost much of my faith in viral videos as well.

Nowadays the only sites I visit on a regular basis are The Escapist (the web’s best gaming magazine), Facebook, my iGoogle page, isohunt.com, mininova.org, eztv.nl, and icanhascheezburger.com. My addiction to ICHC makes me think surfing has damaged my brain.

Maybe, just maybe, a Czech version of rofldogs could be a viable short-term investment.

Feel the burn!

I normally wake up at five a.m. on weekday mornings, a habit that I would have thought insane a year ago. My motivation is simple: my workouts start at the squat rack, and seeing as my gym (the World Class on Wenceslas Square) has only one squat rack, I push myself to be there at six a.m. to get that rack. Actually, it’s not much of a push – if it weren’t for the gym, I’d definitely sleep in every day and would doubtless be less productive than I am.

Jitka feels that I take my exercising too seriously, and she’s probably right. I’m usually in the gym for at least an hour per session, five mornings a week. Right now I’m taking a bit of a break, since the Wenceslas Square World Class is closed for renovations. I’m only going three days a week, mainly working with the dumbbells at the World Class at Chodov, a gym that is way too small to satisfy anybody who works almost exclusively with free weights. The lack of a squat rack really sucks as well.

I’ve been lifting weights since I was fifteen, with several long breaks during that time, the longest being the first four or so years after I moved to the Czech Republic. I remember how hard it was to start up again. I was working in advertising at the time, chain smoking, drinking bottomless cups of coffee, neutralizing all the caffeine in my system with pot and alcohol. On working days my breakfast consisted of a Mickey D’s cheeseburger and café latte. Fast Czinese, pizza, or pub fare for lunch, and pretty much the same for dinner, followed by several rounds of beer. I figured my metabolism was still working in my favor.

Man, was I wrong. One day while trying on shirts under unforgiving fluorescent lights, I saw the horrible truth: I had man boobs and a gut that suggested I was entering my second (or third?) trimester. In a state of mild shock, I returned the shirts to their racks. The next day I got myself a membership at a gym out in Opatov and began waging a never-ending war on gravity.

While I’m no fitness guru, I intend to use this space to share helpful fitness and nutrition tips. Hopefully I’ll be on the receiving end of some good advice as well.

Inertia creeps through comfort

That phase that I referred to in my first post is one of comfort. For the past couple of years (or has it been three? Every year seems to go by faster than the last) I’ve been working primarily as an interactive media specialist (i.e. editor and project manager) for the Czech Republic’s leading telco. I also translate (mainly press releases from the telco and IT sectors, as well as a porn magazine specializing in S&M). I’m firmly entrenched in a niche that provides me with steady work. I’ve got good clients, and my working week is extremely flexible. I sometimes think that the lack of structure in my working week has dulled me to the point of stagnation, but at this point in time I can’t imagine myself keeping to a rigid nine-to-five (and beyond) schedule.

So, yes, things are comfortable, but for about the past year I’ve been grappling with the fact that I’m stuck in a state of inertia, waiting in vain for some outside force to knock me into motion spiritually, mentally, creatively, intellectually, and emotionally. The gym more than takes care of the physical aspect, so at least there’s that.

When I first moved to the Czech Republic, I was all about writing, living the cliché. I prayed at the altars of Bukowski, Miller, Welsh, and Hemingway. I managed to produce a healthy quantity of poetry, short stories, news articles, and even a novel in spite of (or aided by) an unhealthy quantity of booze and drugs. Yes, more cliché. Following an inevitable spiral in Brno, I came to Prague, detoxed, got my shit together, and met the woman who eventually became my wife. That was over a decade ago.

A decade. Damn. That’s hella long ago.

I’m falling into sentimentality now, and I’ve had enough of that. Fast forward to the present. Things are good. A bit dull, but good. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been telling myself it’s time to get back to doing what I came here to do: write. To paraphrase the mighty Wu-Tang Clan, it’s no longer enough to get by, I’ve got to get over. This inertia has gone on long enough.

First post

Another phase, another blog. I’ve done four of these things, the first was intensely personal, the second for money, and three and four were false starts. Of these, only the second and fourth are still up on the interwebs: Dog Eat Blog (the name was my idea, even though I’m more of a cat person) and my MySpace blog. I stopped working for the company that hosts Dog Eat Blog, and for some reason I didn’t really get into the whole MySpace thing. Facebook, now that’s another story, but that isn’t really blogging, unless you count the status updates, which I usually leave blank.

Anyway, I’m posting this from The Globe Café and Bookstore in downtown Prague. The WiFi ain’t free, but the atmosphere’s always good, whether it’s busy or not (today it’s not), and the coffee’s decent. I’ll probably bang off a slew of posts on various topics today, buzzing on filtered coffee refills, hopefully giving this thing some kind of structure.

I don’t usually read extensive posts, but in my past blogs I had a tendency to write way too much, straying from non-existent points, going off on unrelated tangents, and generally being self-indulgent, like most personal blogs. While self-indulgent blogging is not necessarily a bad thing, it usually makes pretty dull reading. So I’ll try to keep things short, but old habits die really hard.

So, what can a reader expect here at Driftword? Obviously entries on stuff that interests me, entries that will provide at most some useful information, at least a welcome diversion during the workday or aimless surfing. Topics include fitness (mainly weightlifting) and nutrition, writing and literature, the internet, computer gaming, Prague and the Czech Republic, and whatever happens to be on my mind when I sit down to write. The next few posts serve as introductions to these topics.