There’s a series of ads on TV that feature a visual metaphor for something to do with finance. An egg-timer to represent a mortgage and sand in the timer to represent the repayments. That kind of thing.
I don’t remember what company or product the ad is for but the reason they have stuck in my mind is that voiceover actually explains the metaphor being shown onscreen.
Edit: Seems they are for Barclay’s Bank and contain the dulcet tones of Stephen Wheatley ( of Portal 2 fame ).
In that same vein of being slapped in the face by the wet fish of metaphor I present to you:
The Hungry Gardener
The Hungry Gardener has got all of the requisite equipment for gardening. Seed, good soil and plenty of tools.
Even though his gloves and kneepads, shovels and spades are top-notch, He hasn’t planted anything.
So nothing can be harvested and he goes hungry.
I’ve been buying domain names and coming up with ideas for sites far more than actually working on them.
This site DeclanCostello.com gets infrequent updates. One thing that’s helped recently is had “real life” friend drop by and comment on the blog a few times.
Even if you’re not thinking of an actual person, create the details of your imaginary reader and write stuff for them. I find it helps me avoid writer’s block as I don’t need to worry about someone somewhere who’s bound to be bored to tears.
If my friend is bored he’ll tell me and we will remain friends.
Apart from this site
Link bingo – only some of these will lead to a working site
I’ve been earning money from affiliate marketing since a few years ago and naturally there’s a half baked site based around that topic.
I am trying to learn Japanese and I created a blog about what I was studying. That’s been updated even less frequently and I also have a few other domains on the same topic.
Even general advice on learning languages and memorisation.
I was a best man for a friend’s wedding a few years ago and naturally a domain name was purchased just in case I decided to go into the speech making business.
I bought a house, wanted to farm fish and took up martial arts.
Buying domains from Namecheap has become the garden shed and I’m rapidly filling it with tools.
This gardening metaphor is closer to reality than I’d like, I have a real garden that needs work as well.
I am going to dig using the rusty old shovel I’ve got and get something growing before investing in anything else.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
You know your real-life friend will turn out to be your theorised imaginary friend and it’ll all end with you holding a gun in your own mouth up on top of a building rigged to take the whole damn corrupt system down with you. There might be a line about kudzu vines in there somewhere.
The film will bomb domestically but you’ll make your money back overseas, so that’s nice.
Is ‘The Hungry Gardener’ your own metaphor? If so, bravo – that’s a really pointed, poignant illustration. In my own career, I’ve never even reached the point of getting my own tools – I’ve mainly been able to use freeware or SDK utilities included with applications. This is going to change soon, with a Unity License and a blog (have a name, think I have a logo) swiftly coming down the track…
This is for reals, yo. And I thank you for shining a light on the Gardener. I shall keep him in mind, to spur me to work.
May I make a suggestion? Well, I dunno. But can I make a suggestion? Hells yeah.
Perhaps you could take all the content and enthusiasm you have for those dispirate sites and concentrate ‘em into this blog? Indeed, instead of a site-per-topic, you could choose a day-per-topic. Gives you a trial run on some material and builds up the content of your key site. Frankly, I’d love to read a post where you expound on your experiences in Japan, or your preparation for a best man speech (would have really helped this week!) and lessons learned as a first-time house buyer… how should one prepare one’s domicile for the coming feline apocalypse?
Many fields have you staked out – a lot of responsibility for a journeyman gardener. Perhaps it makes sense to just concentrate one one crop – maybe potatoes.
Yes, just concentrate exclusively on potatoes.
That’s always worked out well.
Yours,
A Man Whose Garden Is Filled With Wild Grasses Up To His Eye Height And Has Never Started A Blog
…which is to say I’ll just basically repeat what you said in your blog post.
Goddamn I’m tired.
Mmmmm potatoes. What could possibly go wrong for over a million people, altering the future of an entire nation.
Plant spuds, invest in ships and coffins? Coffin ships?
I originally wanted to have a bit of everything in this blog but the topics were fairly diverse and I was mindful of creating sites that I could possibly sell or launch products from.
There might be plenty who would read about learning Japanese but not give 2 nashi for making money online or aquaponics.
But since I haven’t fleshed them out with content anyway it seems I’ve put descartes before the whores.[sic]
The Hungry Gardener metaphor came to me in a fitful night without sleep because I had stuff to do in the garden and also was behind schedule on all my internet work.
And when I say I have my own tools I mean that I have acquired rather than created. I know how to do something that I know could lead to success. Write ( a bit ), publish on wordpress, create email newsletter etc.
There’s a million and one ways to make money online with affiliate marketing, but one of the best case studies I’ve read was about a woman in Florida who wrote 600-word articles and posted them onto a single site which allowed her articles to contain an affiliate link.
She just repeated this process ad nauseum until she was earning $100,000 per year from her living room.
No one starts great and I’m enjoying writing something and not worrying as much that the masses of internet critics are coming to kill me.
People will either like it or not care
By the way if you are surrounded by high grasses, roll around and you have created an instant fort < / childhood advice >
So depressing to see a typo in something I posted almost a week ago. “dispirate”? NO, DISPARATE, you fucking disgrace. I swear, I’ll have to hire somebody to throw bricks at me every time I misspeak or vomit up a typo. It’s the only way I’ll learn.
To the topicmobile!
“There might be plenty who would read about learning Japanese but not give 2 nashi for making money online or aquaponics.”
Needs must relearn tags for posting comments again. Text quotes and raw links just look messy. Anyhow.
a) Aquaponics?
b) Young Master Costello, have you ever heard of these things called ‘tags’? I have been informed that they may be used by the readers of ‘public logs on the internet’ to filter the content posted by the diarist in question. Hence, simply by clicking on a hyper-textual ‘link’, I can render my declancostello.com all aquaponics, all the time.
c) Folks appreciate someone with diverse interests – many of my favourite blogs veer from topic to topic. There is a unifying element – your good self. You have personality to burn (unfortunate phrasing? Perhaps, but let’s just laugh at my inept composition, take the intended message and move on). If this isn’t a commercial blog dedicated to one type of product, people are just going to be unsettled by a continuous laser-tight focus on one topic. Range, mofo, by all means range and be free! Monday, Japanese. Wednesday, affiliate marketing. Friday, homemaking…
Regards “Decartes…” etc. What an extraordinary pun. And how wonderful that it receives the appropriate attention on Reddit. I imagine that Dart22 continues to dine out on that masterly assembled sequence of letters.
Nonetheless, I think you’ve h–
…*shakes head* That really *was* a wonderful pun. Ah… I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. Your first objective should be the regular production of content on one website and, b’god, it doesn’t matter what you have to do or write about to get that content out there.
The content you want to create is mainly written, therefore you are a writer – and a writer writes. EVERY DAY.
Indeed, nobody starts great – I think Ira Glass summed the situation up nicely: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY Sorry if I’ve sent this to you before, but I’ve been showing it to a lot of people… and I’m easily confused.
“They will either like it, or not care.” Frankly, they could hate it and it’d be a success. Obscurity is your enemy, mein guter kamerad, and if you… want to get hit by the bullet of attention, you have to increase your surface area. (…I don’t know, I have planned this post)
You have the life experience, the specialist knowledge, the enthusiasm and wit. The Hungry Gardener proves this, even as you worry about procrastination. Don’t worry about using up a store of material – life will provide ever more. Your biggest problem will be trying to get all down in the time you have left.
If you build it, they will come.
Speaking of Hungry Gardeners, I’m off to get a sandwich. And that’s how we segue, kids.
(HA HA HA STILL NO BLOG MYSELF HA HA HA – wedding was good, though)
I still pronounce segue as ‘seg’ in my head.
Your comments are now the longest and best part of this blog. Internet thumbs aloft!
You are definitely winning me over with your zany ideas about a more generalist blog.
Lots of my early posts here and elsewhere read like bad press releases. Press releases are generally bad before they come within sniffing distance of an adjective. No praise there.
But if I actually write about what I’m doing, and can do it in a decent conversational tone, it becomes the common feature of all the content here.
I like the fact that you are right. I also like the fact that you have argued your point, shown me the means to make it easy on the reader and won me over to the whole idea.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkYuK3AKrxc So, it’s like – you’re Optimus Prime and Megatron and the Decepticons are the forces of procrastination and over-specialisation. And, uh, let’s agree to not think about what happens to Prime after this clip ends.
YOUUU GOT THE TOUCH! *guitar solo*
{ 1 trackback }