Justin Germino Ramblings

The other day I downloaded and played the demo for Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom on the Xbox360 and I really liked the demo.  The game has you play a thief who stumbles upon a legendary creature known as the Majin except he is missing many of his powers, yet still formidable.

Your goal is to help the Majin recover his powers so the two of you can combat the forces of evil in the world and the game has you give orders to the Majin like telling him to attack, stop, crouch, or even to push a wall over to crush enemies.

It reminded me of the original THQ Summoner game which I was very fond of back in the Playstation days, I have read nothing but good things about Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom so I just ordered a copy from Amazon.com for only $19.57! A brand new Xbox360 game as good as this for such a great price is hard to pass up.

If you like Action RPG games that are story driven, I can tell you this one has a Kingdom Hearts feel based on the shadowy creatures you fight.  I am hoping this game is as good as the demo makes it appear.

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-Justin Germino

I was a bit bummed when I found out that Blubrry Powerpress WordPress plugin no longer displays a podcast cover image anymore.  The latest update must have broke this functionality because I used to be able to display a custom image whenever I uploaded an mp3 file and set it as a podcast.

I tried configuring it both ways, in the configuration settings allowing a video poster image and setting it manually.  But I also used the powerpress shortcode by adding the image=”path to image” after the powerpress shortcode and it still didn’t work.

The previous images that showed up for all my previous podcasts are vanished, now I am left with just the “play” bar without any image on it to help the player stand out better.

I mentioned this in the Blubrry Powerpress forum hoping someone will respond to my thread with some instruction or update that will work here.

Update:

The Bluberry Powerpress folks were very responsive to my thread and mentioned that they would look at restoring functionality in a later update.  It must have not been a heavily used one as the image/cover feature works for video casts, just not for audio at the moment.  I also had a typo in my original article which I corrected.

-Justin Germino

A very good article over at Money Dummy Blog run by John Paul Aguiar about Blogging Income Lies and Truths talks about lies or myths told and spread online about making an income blogging and what you must do, or must not do to be able to succeed.  The article does a good job answering a new person’s questions who may be thinking about starting a blog or want’s to know more of what they must do or get an idea of what they must do to make their blog successful.

Truth is, most of the big time bloggers are not successful because they have some magical advice that the smaller time bloggers don’t have.  They are successful because they were pioneers and were the first, like any industry the first ones to make a mark are often the most successful and it very difficult and becomes increasingly more so to stand out against others who already dominate the same niche/market.

You can create another site and join the 17+ million blogs online all competing for attention, readership and trying to make some money for their authors.  Some do it for the fun of it, some for experience, most do it to make a few bucks to pay bills and fewer still have the grand dreams of being able to blog for a living and make enough to fully sustain themselves. 

I have been blogging for 2 1/2 years now and have much more experience and wisdom in what it takes to reach online markets but I can tell you that reaching a huge success online is no more easy than an iPhone game developer trying to create the next Angry Birds.  The competition is fierce and you need to not only bring an authentic and original message to the table, but you have to also spend the time to spread your message.  It only takes a good idea to go viral, something that fills a gap that exists and people didn’t know it existed. 

Quick success that bypasses the years of hard work comes to those lucky enough to create a product or service that people feel they must have, this is something that the ultra successful affiliates know.  They find the products that people don’t know they need yet and they market them first, others with some programming or writing ability will create the first eBook, Tutorials, Video’s, plugins…etc to promote and convince people that they need this product. 

The truth about blogging for income is that you have to actually have a purpose, a shotgun approach without any purpose will lead to months of frustration and flopping.  However, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing because you will gain experience and it may help you find focus and channel your efforts to something tangible and something you can profit from.

I disagree with the mentality to go into blogging thinking you are going to make $100,000 in your first year, or you will be able to retire and live off of your blogging income.  The truth is, you start blogging because you have an idea and you enjoy doing it and want to do it for free.  Only if you can sell yourself on committing to doing something for free, will you be able to endure enough to make it profitable.

I think anyone can start a blog, but should you?  The answer depends on whether it is something you truly love to do and you can enjoy doing it even if it doesn’t meet your expectations as far as monetary earnings or readership growth.  If you are to make blogging your job, then you need to be committed to it like a job.  Just because you can stop and start anytime or work your own hours doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put in that razor sharp focus and dedication that you would to any job.  It is your business, you are vested in it like any entrepreneur vests in a brick and mortar business.  Your odds of success are even less than a brick and mortar business, but this comes with the much lower start up costs too.

The truth about blogging is, it isn’t as easy as you think it is.  Some people have talent, some people have experience and luck plays a bigger factor than people are willing to truthfully say. 

-Justin Germino

Illinois recently passed a law requiring affiliates to collect sales tax from purchases made to consumers in the same state.  Amazon affiliates of course have now way to implement these required sales taxes and are therefore dependent on Amazon to collect the taxes on the sales on their behalf to meet compliance.

Instead Amazon.com sent notice that they no longer affiliates in Illinois will no longer be able to sell products through Amazon and will not be eligible as Amazon affiliates, they would get 0 commission for their sales.  Amazon does not tax items sold in Illinois and instead of writing a system in place to allow for adding taxes to items sold through affiliates who ran businesses in the same state, they instead opted to just separate from their affiliates.

The odd thing is Amazon.com already complies with some sales tax laws and charges sales tax for shipping certain products from certain merchants to certain states.  According to the Amazon.com Sales Help page, this is the list of merchants and states where taxes are applied to an order:

The following is a partial list of merchants selling items at Amazon.com which may be included in your order, and the states in which they charge sales tax.

• Amazon.com LLC: KS, KY, ND, NY and WA
• Amazon Digital Services, Inc.: KY, ND, NY and WA (Kindle content, MP3s, and digital videos are only taxable in KY and WA)
• Electronic Arts, Inc.: All States except for AK, ID, ME, MS, ND, NM, SD, VT, WV, and WY*
• Magazine Express, Inc.: AL and WA
• New York Times, Inc.: AL, DC, KY, and NY*
• Synapse Services, Inc.: WA only
• Target.com: All states other than VT
• Hachette Digital, Inc.: AL, AZ, CO, CT, DC, HI, ID, IN, KY, LA, ME, MS, NC, NE, NJ, NM, SD, TN, TX, UT, VT, WA, WI and WY*
• Harper Collins Publishers, LLC: All States*
• Penguin Group (USA) Inc: All States*
• Simon & Schuster Digital Sales, Inc.: All states other than AK, DE, MT, NH, and OR*
• Macmillan: AZ, CO, CT, DC, HI, IN, KY, ME, MS, NC, NE, NJ, NM, SD, TN, TX, UT, VT, WA, WI and WY*
• Dow Jones & Company, Inc: AZ, CT, DC, HI, ID, KY, NC, SD, and TX*
• Zondervan Corporation LLC: CA, CO, FL, GA, IA, IL, IN, LA, MA, MD, MI, MO, NC, NV, OH, PA, SC, TX and WA*

So I guess wouldn’t it have been better if Amazon just update their system to be able to apply taxes to affiliates who had sites registered in that state?  This way they could keep getting the sales, and just automatically collect and submit the taxes on behalf of the affiliate?  Or, at the very least collect the taxes and distribute them to the affiliate to submit to the government?

Not sure what the easiest way to accomplish this was, but this is now spreading and there are several states that left bloggers scrambling to find other ways to make affiliate income since they can no longer be Amazon associates. 

Here’s to hoping Arizona doesn’t pass an absurdly stupid law that taxes an Affiliates sales, after all the state is already collecting taxes on our Affiliate income as an income tax, it would be a double tax to collect from us both ways.

-Justin Germino

I see many bloggers talk about making money blogging and associate affiliate marketing as "blogging" which I disagree with. 

Blogging

Blogging in the way I interpret it is when somebody shares their opinions, feedback, thoughts or insights on a semi regular basis to an online CMS system.  This is opinion based unlike a journalist who just reports the facts without any personal opinion playing a factor.  A blogger also engages in two way conversations with readers who interact with their blog.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is specifically promoting or selling products to your readers with the intention of convincing them they "need" the product and should purchase it.  You have a direct incentive to convince readers to purchase the product as you make profit based on whether you can convince them to buy it. 

Is Blogging Affiliate Marketing?

I think the two can be used hand in hand and may be similar at times, but they are not the same thing and saying you make money as a blogger when you do affiliate marketing is not the same thing in my opinion. 

How about your opinion or point of view here?  When you think of blogging and pitching affiliate products, do you see it as one and the same?

-Justin Germino

There are way too many games for Xbox360 rated Mature+, Truthfully in my experience these games should have settings for parental control, too many kids want to play the games that are advertised on TV for adults like Halo 3, Dragon Age…etc and these kids are like 10 – 14, they should have a parental control to set a game to PG, PG-13, R ratings and let there be a password set by parent. This way the game could remove blood, gore, sex, language based on parental control setting. This would allow every game to satisfy an E10+ rating as long as parents load the game and put in the control lock. Granted some kids may figure out a way around it, but most would be older anyway and probably not need the parental controls.

Old PC games used to let you do video graphics settings and remove blood and such, a simple thing like showing the action without any blood or gore can really make the rating go down and not be as disturbing.  There is no reason with the technology in place today for the Playstation 3, Xbox360 and Nintendo Wii that game developers can’t add the additional programming to remove certain aspect layers from a game to make it playable by a wider audience.

My kids love to watch me game but I have to restrict what I can play in front of them because I have a hard time finding kid friendly versions of games that appeal to the role playing genre these days, I remember when all games in the RPG genre were PG or PG-13 at best, why do they feel the need to add more shock, gore and such?

There isn’t enough high quality content for the kids who want to play the older kids games, and most parents don’t care enough and just let them play it anyway.

My wife always loved keeping a vegetable and herb garden in the yard which is no easy thing to do in the blistering sun of the Arizona desert and even harder when I have a dog who loves chewing the heads off of the drip system and digging out the 1/4" tubing to chew up.

So four gardens and eight drip system rebuilds later, I think I finally have used my human intellect to thwart my dogs attempt to undermine our attempts to grow a garden.

I buried the 1/2 drip very deep, and I threaded the 1/4" tubing inside 1/2" tubing to protect it, in addition I enclosed the drip heads with a metal mesh screen so my dog can’t get to the plastic drip head itself.  He won’t bother the screen, and the only way he can destroy this landscape system is if he decides to dig it out.  He tends to tug what he can grab, but isn’t a digger so maybe this will survive his destructive tendencies.

Meanwhile we did a line of flowers in the back against the wall and planted tomato plants, bell peppers, radishes, rosemary, thyme and more.

Here’s hoping we have a decent garden in a few months.

-Justin Germino

Books and reading are something that continue to grow and thrive no matter what other technologies and things to do there are.  I always preferred fiction books and used reading as an escapism that brings you more in depth with the story than watching a movie.

Here is the current 10 New York Times Fiction Best Sellers at the moment.
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How many have you already read or listened to on audio book format?  I know they already made a movie about The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest but I haven’t seen it yet.

-Justin Germino

Each generation seems perplexed and outraged by the state of ‘kids today.’ You’d think that your parents grew up in a sanitised Disney movie if you believed the idyllic pictures they paint with their stories of how blissful and uncomplicated life was before the internet and satellite TV – but you can be sure they’d have jumped at the chance to play Grand Theft Auto if only it had been available in the 70s.

There’s always a danger of looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses, especially as childhood is usually such a happy and innocent time. But that doesn’t mean the toys and games you loved so much in your youth should be forgotten for the sake of growing up – look at all the grown men who cried at the end of Toy Story 3 and tell me the older generations don’t pine for those simpler days.

Some of my favourite toys growing up were board games, which provided much of the entertainment before the first game consoles arrived in our home. Looking back, some of these were surprisingly limited, like Dizzy Dizzy Dinosaur – which involved moving Ludo-style cavemen counters around a prehistoric board before letting a wind-up dinosaur loose to knock them over. Pointless, yes – but also a lot of fun. Others were a lot more complicated, like the classics Monopoly, Cluedo and Scrabble, so it’s no surprise which ones have stood the test of time.

Corporate branding was an inescapable part of growing up in the 80s too, and I’m a little ashamed at how adamantly I would demand anything with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Real Ghostbusters logo plastered over it. Some of these toys and games were genuinely fun, like the large (and probably expensive) Turtles’ sewer lair and Ghostbusters fire station play sets. Others, such as the action figures of increasingly obscure characters, were there mostly to fill out the ranks.

When video games arrived, there was a major cultural shift in kid’s games that saw some older entertainments – like my beloved board games – being consigned to the wardrobe forever more. Just like board games, there were some great titles available if you looked hard enough, even on these early machines – Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog and Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros series were firm favourites. But there was also a staggering amount of really bad games that we’d make our parents spend their hard-earned money on – even though those early video games are basic by today’s standards, they didn’t come cheap in the early 90s.

Kids growing up in the 2010s don’t have it any better or worse than those from earlier generations. There may be more gadgets and brands competing for their attention than ever before, but just because something’s new doesn’t mean it won’t be considered a ‘classic’ in time, providing nostalgia for the future.

This was a guest article by Jennifer who is a part of the digital blogging team at alwritenow.com who work with brands like Woolworths. For more information about me, or to keep up to date with the latest in lifestyle news, check out my posts at alwritenow.com or visit my Twitter account, @awnow

I have always told my readers that my favorite novel series of all time is Stephen King’s Dark Tower which combines a Western genre with a post apocalyptic setting.  The Dark Tower has all the elements of Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Western, Horror mixed in as well.  It is so expansive and Stephen King himself has mentioned that it is the framework for every one of his works and each novel he has written in some way has a piece in The Dark Tower.

So I read on Dark Tower Movies about the upcoming film and TV Series and how Ron Howard was on the Howard Stern show talking about the movies…yes Ron Howard will be the director of the epic Dark Tower series.  There will also be a trilogy of films with a TV Mini Series planned by NBC Universal that will take place in the setting between the first and second movies.

I read talks that Javier Bardem and Viggo Mortensen were choice roles for Roland in the films but don’t know which actor will be slated to play the most gritty gunslinger I have ever read about. 

If you are a fan of the Dark Tower Series and want to follow on the latest news, then join DarkTowerMovies.com as they seem to bring the latest information on The Dark Tower.

-Justin Germino