Jack leaned against the wall and groaned. This was it. The attacks had become unbearable. All his attempts at appeasement had failed. They were reduced to only one last desperate choice: to fight back.

They had to kill the monster.

It was such a lopsided affair of overwhelmingly bleak odds that it would have been ludicrously laughable if it didn’t happen to be Jack’s presently lived reality. Jack knew his fate was sealed. Win or lose, he was going to die.

The facts were plain: there was no chance on earth he could take on the monster alone. He would have to recruit every other persecuted party in the territory at a bare minimum. He raised his paws and started the long familiar process of ticking off each plausible ally with his fingers.

There was Charles, who led the family of cockroaches, though they had taken the brunt of the recent decimation and were now barely scraping by. It...

I always wondered how things would end. Now I know.

It wasn’t quite what I expected, but by now I suppose I should have expected that. Nothing really goes according to plan. You always start with a plan, and you bring all your gear, even a friend, make backup plans, double backup plans*, do everything right, but in the end the rope still snaps and you still fall and now you’re broken and it’s the end.

*ok maybe we didn’t do this, or even the single backup plans, but you get the gist of it

At least now you know. Sometimes a shitty certainty is still better than a shitty uncertainty.

Hope was nice while it lasted. We shouted until we couldn’t shout, until our voices were as broken as the rest of our bodies. No one would be finding us here. We had each other, but a dying person isn’t much help to another dying person.

And now I don’t even have a dying person next to me. Just a dead...

PSA: This deal is dead and buried deep in the ground. It’s currently $10 you can earn. Which is still better than nothing, but definitely not as good as it once was. Your choice if you want to do it still or not.

Note - this post looks long, but most of it is a FAQ. The actual post is short.

Yep, you read the title correctly. Basically, this is like a free trial, but way better – Coinbase will pay you to try them out for 5 minutes.

Long story short: Coinbase, the world’s leading bitcoin company, recently raised $75 million in a major funding round. To celebrate, they’re offering anyone who refers a new user that buys $101 or more in bitcoin a whopping $75 referral bonus. You can read full details here.

This is one of largest referral bonuses ever offered, period. When you buy $101 in Bitcoin, Coinbase charges you a $1 transaction fee. In return, they pay out $75 to the referring user...

PSA: This deal is dead and buried deep in the ground. It’s currently $10 you can earn. Which is still better than nothing, but definitely not as good as it once was. Your choice if you want to do it still or not.

Note: Feel free to post this hack on your own blogs/social media/email lists/etc., using your own referral link for epic win and $$$. A link to this blog would be appreciated though – win-win-win-win!

This is one of those win-win-win awesome free money opportunities that comes up every now and again. They invariably don’t last long, so if you’d like to make a free $35 with 5 minutes of effort, I suggest you do the following now. Also – the opportunity isn’t just $35 in 5 minutes – you could theoretically make unlimited money doing this. Read on:

The Opportunity:

On August 20th, Coinbase, one of the largest bitcoin exchange and digital wallet services, decided they had way...

Simple. Just an infographic for today.

Full disclosure for those coming from elsewhere, not familiar with us: I’m the cofounder of Sprayable, and we make Sprayable Sleep, which is discussed here. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sprayable-sleep-sleep-you-spray-on-your-skin

By now, just about everyone in the world knows the power of social news aggregators - a must for launching a product is making an attempt to frontpage on HackerNews and/or Reddit. In some user acquisition/business models, the strategy sometimes revolves around doing solely that.

However, while HackerNews and Reddit are indeed amazing ways to get the word out about a product - they’re not explicitly designed for the purpose, and there’s a new player in the field that’s showing, in record time, the potential to rapidly overtake HN and Reddit as the goto for product launches.

I’ll have to admit - I was a little skeptical the first time I heard about Product Hunt. Ryan Hoover, the cofounder, had been a good friend of mine for quite a while before he launched PH - we used to blog together when he was back at PlayHaven - and when he first described it to me, it seemed like a stretch that PH...

Six months since my last post, nine months since my last real post. June 7th, 2013. Hmm. We were getting ready to launch Sprayable Energy in August, and I was getting ready to go back to school for a semester. I figured I’d just take a short one month break, and then get back into the habit of blogging twice a week.

Lessons learned: It’s really easy to fall off the bandwagon, even for really strong habits. Falling off the blogging bandwagon happened despite me having blogged for a fairly long time with pretty solid consistency. It took a significant event for me to justify falling off the bandwagon consciously, but once that happened, it was pretty much game over.

This happened again just this past January - I’d been keeping a daily progress journal online for the past 551 days with only one short weeklong break during a cruise prior, and then I had to fly to New York for a weekend...

Gee, that was a bit longer than four months.

Four months ago, I penned my last post and then decided to go on hiatus for a month.

I guess I never really came back. Sorry guys! If you were curious what I was up to - well, it was Sprayable Energy.

This is a bit late notice too - by the time you read this, there will probably either be just a few hours left in Sprayable Energy’s campaign or none at all and you will have missed out on this opportunity and these deals forever. Again, sorry guys - I wish I was a better marketer, but clearly I’m not :).

Actually, we really aren’t good marketers. We somehow managed to raise over $160,000 on Indiegogo in about 40 days, which I suppose if extrapolated out would suggest that we managed to get enough traction to potentially sell well over a million dollars in revenue a year pre-product. Fingers crossed things go as well in reality.

So here we...

As of today, I have gone exactly 150 days without playing a single video game.

This represents something of a minor miracle for me. This is almost certainly (I can’t say certainly only because of the addled memory I have from playing so many video games) the first time I have ever gone remotely this long without playing video games since I first touched the unholy blight that is a video game.

I used to read books as a kid. This was fantastic. My vocabulary, spelling, grammar, writing, and general language skills skyrocketed effortlessly. I probably became more intelligent and imaginative and creative. Reading fostered a fecund brain.

And then one day a flyer came in the mail, advertising a ridiculously cheap copy of Total Annihilation for whatever reason. My dad decided it couldn’t hurt to buy it for me.

How terribly, terribly wrong he was.

Really fucking terribly wrong.

But it...