GBS

[CML]

yoooo who wants to critique my website / nascent tutoring biz

http://seattlepiano.blogspot.com/

stuff like the below is very helpful

• Gave it a quick read-over. It read like either your target demographic is ESL students, or you're a know-it-all.
  
  Formatting was very nice on Firefox.
  51 minutes ago · Like
• ​
  ​
  Alexander M. West Know-it-all is polite for smart but condescending.

and

"If you're trying to make a serious business out of this, I recommend an actual website. A blog with a gmail address looks unprofessional, and a dedicated website would probably draw more hits and end up selling more hours of tutoring. The argument could be made that the language is slightly sophomoric as well, but I can understand why, considering the nature of who your target demographic is (what your friends and intellectual peers see as overly verbose or conceited may come off well to the parents who are seeking tutoring for their children)."

 

[CML]

p.s. how many $ = domain

edit: lucre: i was visiting a friend at IU bloomington music school when a gaunt man of irreproachable dress walked by and complimented her on playing that was 'at the center of the resonance curve.' he introduced himself as doug and through some fortunate feat of mnemotechnic i was able to connect two and two and put the dots together. that night we ingested acid in the quad, then wandered out to the fields around town; there, the sunrise triggered an existential crisis for my clarinetist friend, who had just grasped the age of the universe relative to her own, and wanted to see a priest. poor girl, she was quite traumatized -- her parents had raised her a catholic.

 

[Jason Waddell]

You can ask Eric about setting up a domain. Buying one is cheap, like $15 for two years. The most expensive part about this site was the forum software.

 

[Lucre]

p.s. how many $ = domain

edit: lucre: i was visiting a friend at IU bloomington music school when a gaunt man of irreproachable dress walked by and complimented her on playing that was 'at the center of the resonance curve.' he introduced himself as doug and through some fortunate feat of mnemotechnic i was able to connect two and two and put the dots together. that night we ingested acid in the quad, then wandered out to the fields around town; there, the sunrise triggered an existential crisis for my clarinetist friend, who had just grasped the age of the universe relative to her own, and wanted to see a priest. poor girl, she was quite traumatized -- her parents had raised her a catholic.

Can we find you a musings column?

 

[Eric Chan]

Yeah, I think you can snag one for like $10 / year. Blogspot should have some automatic way to hook up your blog to your domain.

If you want something that looks more like an 'actual website', but is still just secretly a blog underneath, you can try setting something up over on wordpress.com. The advantage of Wordpress is that you can format your front page so it doesn't look like a blog. That is, those three blog posts you have could be arranged in a panel or something, like on here: http://wpshower.com/demo/?theme=suburbia.

 

[CML]

Lucre: (if it wasn't already obvious) I just made that up. Doug is present in my acid thoughts though. much like business, writing is a way to be in multiple places at once.

eric, jason -- tyvm

 

[Dom Harvey]

I agree that if you're aiming at crunchy suburbanite parents it has to look more professional. Chris, not CML/itscml. Use exclamation marks sparingly. '__ Tutors Everything!' appears too gimmicky; it makes you sound like a jack of all trades able to teach basic material but not someone they would want to throw money at to coach their kids. 'For cheap' sounds superficially good but has the ring of you being cheap as well as the lessons; 'reasonable' or something might work better. I'm not convinced 'Columbia alum' works in the tagline or that a tagline is needed.

 

[Lucre]

You're a real tease CML...

 

[CML]

dom -- yeah i think i'm gonna buy a domain and fix it up. one thing, though -- americans are explicitly obsessed with "merit" and "mobility" and closet-obsessed with "class," so, you'd be surprised at all the horrible things having "gone to Columbia" (which was really unpleasant btw) lets me get away with on dates and jobs. card games provide a nice respite from this.

 

[Jason Waddell]

I've got a bit of the reverse over here. In America people knew what my school was, but it's just outside of Ivy League, so in Europe nobody has no idea what it is.

 

[CML]

it's nice, isn't it, their not caring? maybe the same is true of columbia in europe, the college had a fierce inferiority complex (being firmly below the haut monde of harvard-yale-princeton) so everyone there was either a reject of those places (me) or someone who actually wanted to go to columbia, which was far weirder

(our playgroup's best player went to CMU)

 

[Chris Taylor]

So today I have realized I've hit 99 likes on this forum.
I pledge to now keep that number stable, only liking a post by first going through the forums and unliking a previous one

 

[Jason Waddell]

That sounds like way too much effort for a statistic that nobody but you will track. But whatever boils your spaghetti man.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Mmmm.... Spaghetti...

 

[Rob Dennis]

I guess Mr Waddell like Stanford?
http://twitpic.com/dkea1p

 

[Jason Waddell]

Mr. Waddell looks like many things to many people. See: old Facebook logo.

 

[Dom Harvey]

guys

isn't it beautiful?

 

[anotak]

the first rare i ever pulled from a magic pack:
immortal coil
the best use i found for it was a convoluted combo with donating it and exiling their graveyard. i didnt realize it was a nerfed version of another card

also why is an enchantment named 'nefarious lich', that makes 0 sense

 

[CML]

i guess some people are just really into shakespeare

 

[Jason Waddell]

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,

 

[anotak]

man that not being a creature is such bad design, theres so much stuff in magic that names and art need to clearly convey things, sort of like people assuming this guy has flying because he clearly has flying in the picture:

i've never had that particular card do it to me because i always see it and i think 'oh its the trinket mage remix' and shortcut it in my head but not all the newer players have that background.
also in big edh games when i played my mono-white play all the hate cards and no ways to win edh deck, i used to play this guy:

and i cannot count how many times people attacked me or something else with a 2/2 and i just blocked and they were like "wait, that's a creature?" just because the art and everything looks so much like an enchantment, and the old white power/toughness on white background text is sort of hard to see in shiny sleeves.
edit: dammit its giving the new border one if i use the ci tag.

 

[Jason Waddell]

One of my cube regulars just qualified for the Pro Tour. I'm going to go ahead and claim about 65% credit for it.

 

[CML]

whoa no way! congrats to whomever it was.

we're driving to spokane in 90 minutes to try and do the same, except so are a bunch of other seattle people. if i wanna get on the PT i should probably just move to Ypres

on the other hand i am living proof that you can qualify for one SCG Invitational and just go to as many as you want while still sucking

 

[Jason Waddell]

I've only played him in sanctioned play once, where I crushed him 2 - 0 in a "still had all these fashion". But I don't think he has ever gone worse than 2 - 1 in our drafts. Our cube results correlate with skill level to a startling degree.

 

[James Stevenson]

Man, I'm cutting my cube down and realising my pet card that tutors legends hardly has any targets any more. There are no legends in my mono green section! Hwat?! Silvos kept going in and out, but he kinda sucked. Nobody wanted to play him. Are there any green legends I'm missing?