hamster – Like You've Got Something Better To Do

I made this little horror movie/music video to highlight some of the recordings I made recently with the Orchestra of the Unwanted. The Orchestra of the Unwanted is a growing collection of eccentric musical instruments I built from recycled materials and found objects. You can see pictures and demonstrations of the instruments by following this link.

The unique sounds of these crude instruments inspires the music I make with them. A lot of the music I make with the Orchestra of the Unwanted sounds like it belongs in a horror movie, so I got the idea to make a video to accompany this new album that had the look of a classic black and white horror movie from the ‘50s.

Then I remembered Rothenburg. In the summer of 2019 I visited Rothenburg, a medieval walled village in Germany. It is a beautiful place with cobblestone streets and 500 year old houses. They have a castle and a cathedral with some of the very best German woodcarving, but they also have a monster.

I saw it, and took pictures of it. It was one of the strangest things I have ever seen, and the image of it has haunted me ever since. I realized that Rothenburg had everything I needed to make a horror movie.

I shot the Vampire Hamster of Rothenburg almost entirely, on location, in Rothenburg, Germany, as an unwitting tourist, no doubt saving myself thousands of Euros in permit fees. The movie tells the story of a doomed love affair, a treacherous play for power that brings down an empire, and a bloodthirsty monster’s 500 year reign of terror. Although the story, and all of the characters portrayed in The Vampire Hamster of Rothenburg are completely fictional, the monster is REAL.

The whole movie is only 11 minutes long, but it includes excerpts of all 8 tracks of my new 53 plus minute long album, also titled The Vampire Hamster of Rothenburg by Tin Can Luminary and the Orchestra of the Unwanted. I hope you enjoy the movie, and that you like the music in it enough to check out the album, and make it the soundtrack to your own horror movie.

10 Great Ideas to Bring More Traffic to Your Blog

When I started this blog, over two years ago now, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t understand why people wrote blogs, or what made one blog more popular that another, or why anyone reads blogs at all. I never read blogs myself. I have better things to do with my time, and feel terribly sad for those who don’t.

After a couple of years in the blogosphere, however, I have discovered that the key to understanding the blog phenomena, and to blogging successfully lies in understanding one critical fact. That fact is, people are idiots.

Yes, the web is full of suckers, in fact, the web was designed for suckers, and these suckers roam the web looking for something to suck on. If you want them to suck your blog, the first thing you have to do is:

Think like an idiot. If you visit the web’s most popular blogs, you’ll find yourself wondering, “Who would be stupid enough to read this tripe?” The answer is that among today’s, “media savvy” content consumers, you won’t find many with an IQ higher than your average hamster. Intelligent people think for themselves, based on their own experience, and learn from doing things themselves. Consequently, intelligent people have little use for the internet, and spend very little time online.
Create the illusion that you are providing useful information. Your blog should look, on first glance, as though it might really supply something useful or insightful. Of course it doesn’t, because if you knew how to do anything, you would have something better to do that write a blog.
State your opinion. Like the old saying goes: opinions are like assholes, everyone has one, and mostly they’re full of shit. Chances are, your stupid opinion falls somewhere on the continuum of idiocy between flaming liberal and lock and load libertarian. So, no matter how pea-brained, ill-considered or moronic your opinion, most idiots will either agree, or disagree with it. This encourages “reader engagement”, and soon your blog will overflow with stupid comments.
Celebrity endorsements. Sure, it would be great if you could convince a major celebrity to endorse your blog, but you probably don’t know any major celebrities, and they will never return your calls because they have better things to do than read your stupid blog. Instead, to increase traffic at your blog, I suggest that you endorse some celebrities For instance, I wholeheartedly endorse Mylee Cyrus’ decision to go braless.
Find a way to inject some T and A into your blog. Sure, sexualized images are exploitative and degrading, besides that, they are cruel, but if it weren’t for exploitative, degrading and cruel uses of technology, we’d all still live in teepees and hunt bears with stone tipped spears. Adding T+A to your blog is as close as you can come to directly injecting your readers with drugs. Sure it’s great if people enjoy your writing, but to keep them coming back, you want them to physically desire your blog.
Ask a provocative question that keeps people hanging until they click on a link. For instance: Is this a picture of Tom Hanks diseased penis? Click here to find out.
Write about famous brand name products, like this: McDonald’s to open luxury drive through lane for Lexus owners serving Crystal champagne and Absolut Vodka bloody marys. Not only are brand names like Starbucks, GAP and KFC some of the few words that idiots rarely misspell, brand name companies tend to google themselves a lot.
Use lots of photographs. Idiots don’t have much of an attention span. The quickest way to get them to leave your site is to post a whole page of text without a single picture, and the best way to get an idiot to read the copy you write, is to insert an intriguing, but inscrutable photograph into it.
Lists. 5 reasons lists work:
1. Eliminate the need for pesky context
2. Suit short attention spans
3. No need to index
4. Easy to pad out
5. No need to think in complete sentences
Offer to help people attract more traffic to their website. Everyone wants more traffic at their website. They don’t care where it comes from, or how it got there. When it comes to web traffic, more is always better. You’ll never know if people actually read your post, but on the web, all that really matters is that they looked at the page. If, after reading a sentence or two, they decide to go looking for something else, that counts as much as someone who read every word, so all you really need is a title that sucks people in, followed by a bunch of blah… blah… blah…