Daily Prompt: Truth or Dare

Daily Prompt: Truth or Dare.

Seriously? Is it possible to be too honest?

Let’s chew on some deliciously salty food for thought, shall we?

 

-Yes honey, that dress DOES make your butt look big.

-Actually potential mate who happens to be a single mother, I find kids to be irritating and gross.

-No, I actually find organic food to be a supreme waste of money.

-No darling child, I love you and your siblings all the same.

 

Honesty is NOT always the best policy.

I’m sorry, but in my personal world view, I find that occasionally there is a time where shading the truth, omitting facts, or flat out ignoring something is going to be the best option available. No questions asked, hands down.

If we lived in a world where everyone was 100% honest 100% of the time in regards to 100% of all the things, then I believe we would find a way to cope with it. In fact, I believe it would make SOME things better.

Examples? Of course I have examples.

-ANYTHING politically charged! I’d like to see what the president had to say if he couldn’t lie for a few days.

-Courting rituals! Is this a one night stand or is he/she actually looking for love?

-Poker? Actually, this would ruin poker, but I’m sure we could come up with a new game if we tried.

-Fast food advertising! I’d like to see a poster that actually showed what a taco bell burrito looked like when they used truth to sell it.

***SIDE NOTE!***

Taco Bell burritos actually look like they are advertised. It’s everything else that doesn’t look accurate. I mean seriously, how hard is it to screw up the sale of a tortilla.

Regardless, back to the rant.

 

Truth is subjective to the situation where it is used in our current society. My religious roots tell me that the ability to choose… to choose right from wrong, good from evil, or truth from fiction is essential to our trial and purpose to being on this earth. Taking away ones free agency is something that would defeat the entire purpose of being here.

So… truth or dare… it’s a valid question. I choose truth simply because it is USUALLY the easiest method.

But are there times where it’s not the best option? Absolutely. It’s just up to the individual to determine when those situations arise.

 

*** Secondary side note!***

Darling wife: No, that dress does NOT make your butt look big.

Former Potential Mate: I do ACTUALLY like kids.

Organic Food Hippie: Sorry, Organic food IS still a scam. Sorry. And get a haircut you dirty hippie!

Loving children: I do love you equally! Sometimes I like one of you more than the other, but I LOVE you equally! (Don’t hate! I believe there is a difference between liking someone and loving someone. Deal with it!)

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If Mario was Cheating on Peach, He’d do it here!

Mario seems like an upstanding guy.

I mean, he has like 87 games that he stars in and has more marketing power than Steve Jobs ever could hope for. Mario is a ROCK STAR!

But, what do all rock stars have in common?

INFIDELITY!

Seriously though, Mario is a bad ass.

Anywho, the reason for today’s post is this…

 

This picture is awesome on like 3 different levels.

I made the comment that if Mario was gonna cheat, this is where he would do it. I mean, it’s his own castle, it’s got a bed, and as awesome as Peach is, Daisy would NOT hesitate to capitalize on real estate like this.

I guess the long of the short here is that this childrens bunk bed is pretty awesome.

Makes me wish I had one as a kid… or a teenager… Hell, I want one now and I’m 33.

Picture Tagging: You’re doing it wrong! (Google Juice)

If you are here trying to figure out how to get more hits on your blog, then you came to the right place. Keep reading.

GOOGLE JUICE: The stuff you pour on your blog to make it show up on google!

So, I write a blog.

I enjoy writing, it makes me smile.

Recently I did a post based on the cheapest drug an internet junkie can get. I talked about page hits and getting people to actually click on the links and read the site. I hadn’t figured out how to actually get people to this place.

Well, while I was on the phone with my amazing wife Andrea recently, and I was saying how I was SO excited that I got 21 hits in one day one time.

I know what you are thinking, “Garen, 21 hits is LAME!” and you are right, 21 hits IS lame. She told me that she was getting upwards of 60 hits off of a single post each day on something she hasn’t written about in months. I wondered how the hell she was pulling this off. After talking to her a bit, she explained that I had to put information in to my meta tags for the pictures themselves.

So, after a bit of playing around I figured out how to add my tags. I went back and filled in the tags on a half dozen posts and suddenly, within actual MINUTES, I was getting hits on the site. I was very impressed. Something so simple and it was generating interest in what I was writing. Well, actually, it wasn’t generating interest, it was actually just letting people find me a little easier.

So, how do you tag your pictures so that you can get more hits?

What You Don’t Know About Your WordPress Title Tag

When you upload a picture to your WordPress site the uploaded picture automatically is given the same title as the one you gave the file in your computer.

This of course means you optimized the picture file title from ’249384.jpg’ to ‘freds_fine_fish.jpg’ before you uploaded the photo to your website.

For a lot of you, the next step from there is to select the size and placement of the photo and move on.  No more optimizing work to be done here.  Picture title optimized.  Success.

Wrong.

What you may not have realized is that in WordPress, the option in the photo editor that is red starred as required, is not where you optimize your pictures.

Nope.  To optimize your pictures for maximum search engine goodness, you want to be sure you’ve entered your keywords into the second selection labeled ‘Alternate Text’.  That’s right, the spot that sports the red star, while required by WordPress, doesn’t actually do much for optimizing your website photos.  That second line, that’s where your google juice is.

So there you have it. That’s how it’s done.

Go back, fill in your tags, and you’ll be good. Instant fame, success, and a new car in the garage*

(*Fame, success, and new car not guaranteed)

Holler if you wanna see something posted here, maybe click the follow the blog button. Possibly share whats going on here on reddit. It could be a good thing.

-Garen

How do I do my taxes?

This is a very good question.

How do I do my taxes?

Well, considering the drop dead date of April 15th is quickly coming… if you haven’t done them yet, you might be in a bit of trouble.

Since this isn’t a “how-to” for the process, I won’t be giving an actual step by step. What I WILL be doing is telling you about my personal experiences.

I file my taxes online.

I do it through a site called TAXFREEDOM.com.

It runs off of turbo tax and they LOVE the military. I do my federal filing for free. My state filing was free. And it was QUICK.

I think my taxes took me a little less than an hour this year. Considering I got nearly $8,000 back from the federal government, I consider it a decent use of my time. The refund was in my grubby little hands 4 days after hitting submit. I couldn’t honestly ask for a better tax return experience.

They hold on to my records from the last 10 years of filing with them, and I can access my information at ANY time.

It’s pretty cool.

Remember kids… thats http://www.taxfreedom.com

 

-Garen

Two SIMPLE ways to grow.

Leadership is one of those things that can’t rally be handed to you in a few short steps.

It has to be grown. It has to be clutivated. You have to pay attention to what you are doing under a very broad set of guidelines in order to improve, and it isn’t something where the same method will work in all cases. It’s like trying to nail jello to a wall. You can’t really do it effectivly unless you have purchased a Jell-o brand Wall Nailer.

I’m kidding about the wall nailer, but I’m serious about the rest. Leadership, to those that aren’t involved regularly, is a very difficult thing to grasp. I am currently trying to grasp it myself. I have a basic understanding of what is asked of me, but being able to put actions in to practice has been proving difficult. The big spot where I have been failing is caused by me not knowing what actions I have to actually put in to practice.

As with so many other things in my life, the answer was handed to me by my father some years back.

Two books were handed to me as a child.

As a Man Thinketh by James Allen

&

How to Win Friends and Influence Other People by Dale Carnegie

(You can click the titles for their Wiki Links, also available for PDF download at the end of this post.)

These two books, for at least a little while after I read them (thanks to my ADD), change my life. They teach me how to deal with people. How to lead. How to be sincere. How to have the positive attitude required for success in a world that prefers to destroy people.

From self actualization as put out by James Allen, to the finer points of making anyone like you, winning ANY argument, and getting people to do what you want and making them think it’s their idea as coming from Dale Carnegie… These books are AMAZING!

I’ll be frank, they are a great toilet read. If you’re sitting in the bathroom, read a chapter. Sitting in the car, read a chapter. Sitting in church and the sermon is bland and you can’t pay attention, read As a man thinketh.  You don’t have to devote weeks on end to these great works of literary management. A minute here, two minutes there, and every time you read you WILL learn something.

I can’t stress it enough how good these two books are.

In fact, since I’m sure you would enjoy them, I’ve taken the liberty of linking to their online (and downloadable) PDF versions so that you can actually see and read what I’m talking about.

Not just exceprts, but the whole thing.

Read them. Print them if you want. Just take a look.

I promise you won’t be dissapointed.

Oh, and since I said I would provide them, here are the links to the full books.

AS A MAN THINKETH by James Allen [download]

HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE OTHER PEOPLE by Dale Carnegie [download]

The butchers have our flag.

How do you think those around you would feel if they knew that 2,000 years from now the central point behind all of the major wars would be contesting around who has posession of a flag?

 

I recently picked up Tribes: Ascend. You can read about it HERE. I realize that I don’t have many friends that play the kind of games that I play, but it doesn’t stop me from trying to put the resources out there for people to use. If you recall, I put together a post like this about the game Descent a while back.

Anyways, this post is a lot like the one I did about Descent, except I’m doing it about Tribes.

The majority of the information I’m putting up here was gleaned from the Hi-Rez Tribes Forums. The post can be found HERE.

Simply put, Tribes is a game of massive multi-player warfare where teams consist of 32 vs. 32 players. It’s on an epic scale. It can be deathmatch, Capture the Flag, or a handful of other game modes. Deathmatch and CTF being the most popular.

While you can run around on the ground, you also have a fancy jetpack that can propel you forward or up in to the air. Adding this extra dimension of movement makes the game faster, more difficult, and way more entertaining than you would think it could be.

There have been a number of Tribes games that have released over the years.  Now, to save you some heartache, I’m only providing information for two or three of them because some don’t get played anymore.

First was Starsiege: Tribes

This is was created the genre of tribes style games that included the jetpack. It doesn’t get played much anymore and those that do are usually on the higher end of elite and don’t take well to newcomers. If you consider yourself a glutton for punishment though, you can snag it here.

Then there was Tribes 2.

Man, this game was AWESOME. It is still being supported by the fan community over at TribesNext. You can go there to download the entire thing. OR… you can just click HERE.

Some people complained that they wanted a storyline above the shoot, kill, repeat model that had been in place for years. So, they brought out…

Tribes: Vengeance

This game was good in my opinion. I enjoyed the story. The game play was solid. There were a few new features and I had a good time with the single and multiplayer.

The game isn’t played online by many people anymore, BUT, the single player campaign is TOTALLY worth playing.

Want to give it a shot? Click HERE

Okay, now we have moved into the modern era …

Tribes: Ascend.

Again, you can go look at the post I put up about it for more information (I reccommend this!), but if you wanna just skip the whole thing, then you can always just GO HERE and download the game. It’s quick, easy, and fun to play.

So, there you go. It’s all the basic info you need.

DOWNLOAD LINKS:

Tribes 1

Tribes 2

Tribes Vengeance

Tribes Ascend

An AMAZING explaination of the Game and the mechanics.

Click Here for that.

And my personal thoughts on the whole thing.

Right here!

Pick it up. Play it. Enjoy it.

It really is fun.

I promise.

-G