Articles

Easy Sunlight • 17th March 2023

Here comes the sun! What you need to know about indoor tanning, tanning oil, and sun safety in 2023

As the Beatles put it, "It's been a long, cold, lonely winter." You've been waiting for the sun all winter. Nothing beats that first, gorgeous sunny day. And you want to shine with gorgeous skin starting on that very first sunny day.

One of the best things you can do is thoroughly research tanning oil to make sure that you can protect your skin, whether you go tanning inside or out.

UP Blog • 9th January 2023

Plagiarism Checking: Does it really work? – The Unemployed Professors Blog

Plagiarism checking has become an unfortunate extra step in the drudgery of the essay writing process. Thanks to the arms race between students and teachers, the general dynamic is that all students are presumed guilty of plagiarism until proven innocent by a for-profit algorithm. With that lovely thought in mind, let’s explore the fascinating world of online plagiarism checkers...

UP Blog • 3rd January 2023

AI Essay Writing: The Risks of Using An Essay Bot – The Unemployed Professors Blog

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or in a coma, you’ve probably heard about the explosion of new AI programs that help with writing. The development of a technology called GPT-3, which basically an operating system for artificial intelligence text, has kickstarted a burgeoning industry in AI essay writing. TikTok and YouTube have exploded with ads touting AI essay writing or “typing” services that churn out essays almost as fast as Unemployed Professors’ writers after an espresso or three.

The Motley Fool • 20th July 2022

Solana Foundation Slapped With Class Action Lawsuit Alleging SOL Is a Security

Could a class action lawsuit filed against the creators and early investors in Solana (SOL -0.19%) impact your ability to invest in crypto? Some commenters worry it might. A new lawsuit circulates around the question of whether cryptocurrency is a security. Alleging that the defendants were involved in illegal securities trading, the suit could be a harbinger of disruptive rulings revisiting whether crypto is a security and whether non-accredited investors can participate – or it could be a noth

The Motley Fool • 6th July 2022

Is "Solana Summer" (Finally) Upon Us?

Many crypto analysts have spurned Solana (SOL -0.14%) as an Ethereum knockoff, but it may finally be coming into its own. If crypto intrigues you, but the high prices and environmental impact of Bitcoin and Ethereum are turn-offs, maybe you've heard of Solana as an alternative. Is "Solana Summer" an investment opportunity? Solana differs from Bitcoin and Ethereum in some fundamental ways, and its current price is an attractive entry point.

The Motley Fool • 27th June 2022

Can Etsy Knit Together a Recession-Proof Plan?

If you think Etsy's (ETSY -3.55%) business model as an e-commerce platform offering craft luxuries will struggle during a bear market, think again. Etsy has some unique advantages that other digital sales platforms like Amazon, Shopify, and eBay lack. It has also proven to be a resilient and adaptive company. Etsy was successful during the peak of the pandemic, when it became a go-to source for masks, while e-commerce giants like Amazon struggled to keep up with demand. This shows that during a

The Motley Fool • 17th June 2022

Coinbase is Tarnishing Its First-Mover Advantage

Coinbase Global (COIN 7.47%), the biggest American cryptocurrency exchange, has had a terrible year so far. Coinbase has dominated headlines in 2022 thanks to disappointing first-quarter earnings, a hiring freeze followed by broad layoffs, and macroeconomic factors that have sent crypto into a tailspin. Analysts and investors alike tend to conflate Coinbase with crypto and crypto markets – but it is time to separate Coinbase from crypto and ask some hard questions about the company's strategy, i

Substack • 13th April 2022

NFT Project Failures, Part One

I’ve been trading NFT’s since late September, which in NFT time is about 400,000 years. In that time, I’ve witnessed many failed projects, and I’ve even been taken in by a couple of them. Since everything is a learning opportunity, I thought it might be useful if I wrote about NFT project failures. What does it mean for an NFT project to fail? How does it happen? Are there warning signs, particularly for legitimate projects that don’t otherwise raise red flags?

Substack • 8th April 2022

NFT Tips for Your Friday: Minting from a Contract

"Let’s talk about minting NFT’s directly from the contract. I’m going to explain what minting from the contract is, why you should do it, how to do it, and a few other things that I think are important..."

29th March 2022

Reviewing NFT Tools Part 2: My Review of Nansen

"I’m not getting into theology here, but if Nansen’s NFT God Mode represents what a God can do, then gods are more limited than we may have thought."

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Geek Buffet • 4th June 2013

You Need to Read My Struggle: Volume 1 A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Continuing with my intermittent attempts to blog about the best books I read this year, today I am recommending the first volume of the English-language edition of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s colossal work My Struggle. Yeah, you read that correctly. My struggle. It sounds worse in Norwegian: Min kamp.

Ouch. No, I assure you, the title is not what you’re thinking.

What is there for me to write, though, other than “go read it?” I feel it might be somewhat within the spirit of the novel to torture you

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Geek Buffet • 7th August 2013

Disruption and Performance: The John Vanderslice Oregon Living Room Shows, June 2013

I don’t pretend to be a person who knows a lot about performance theory; I certainly don’t play one on the Internet. In fact, I know almost nothing about the field besides the few articles I taught, and poorly, in my prior incarnation as an instructor of interpersonal communication. However, I recently had the incredible opportunity to attend not one or two or even three, but FOUR glorious nights of living room concert shows given by the singular John Vanderslice...

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Geek Buffet • 16th January 2013

Recently Read: Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman

Girlchild, by the improbably-named Tupelo Hassman, is in spite of itself fast becoming my favorite recent novel. I know, how very middlebrow of me. Actually, the technical title is Girlchild: A Novel, but one of the few things I hate more than genocide is when a book feels the need to condescendingly point out that it’s A Novel, as opposed to garden hose or a life insurance policy or a cabbage or something, so I will just ignore that. Today, I will explicate three reasons you should ...

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Geek Buffet • 11th September 2012

A Crisis of Face

I have been trying to write this essay for over a year now, which is completely and utterly ridiculous (to give you some idea, the file name I’m working from right now is “laser eyes crisis of face redux part eleventy the return of the revenge electric boogaloo.docx”).

It’s way too embarrassingly personal for this blog (so I thought; it probably still is), but it is also too pedantic and research-y for my personal blog. Here is where I default to my crappy academic first-paragraph structure in