Saturday, November 28, 2020

Paywall

 






I hate to do it.


I started clerkmanifesto as a free and open gift to the Internet. I followed the rules. I wrote content every single day for almost eight years. I shared it, as it was recommended, and as I was supposed to, in all the social media I could find and in every place that would allow me to. But there were ever fewer and fewer places on the Internet to share. Indeed it has become easier to share poisonous huckster scams on the Internet than it is to share free gifts.

Maybe people only value the things that it costs them to get. Alas.

And so in this way one day my blog here stumbled upon pure gold. 

I hurt my finger. 

There was interest among my 37 subscribers in seeing a picture of the dark bruise under my pointer fingernail. For years in the creation of my blog I would simply have just shown it. But my lack of popularity had darkened me. And in that darkness I saw, hung on a tree, glowing, so to speak, a forbidden fruit.

I plucked it.

I PLUCKED IT!

I would not show a picture of my fingernail wound unless we could get clerkmanifesto up to ONE MILLION subscribers.

I would make the world pay to see the fruits of my creativity!

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!


And it worked!

My number of subscribers soared up, in a fever of interest, to 37 subscribers!



This being close enough to a million I relented and showed my finger.

This is what it looked like:











All of this happened five weeks ago.

And now clerkmanifesto readers, our numbers vastly inflated from 37 to an amazing number I long thought I'd never see, 37, are interested in seeing how this fingernail bruise has progressed.

But there is no going back once one has tasted the sweet fruit of Capitalism, clickbait, paywalls, fame, manipulation, marketing, and profit.

After all those years of simply showering my gifts on an uncaring and uninterested Internet, I withheld. And only then did they come to me. Only then did I taste the fame and glory I felt was mine!

Well too much is never enough!

I do have a picture of my wound from now, five weeks later.

But I have paywalled it!

Ha!

If that's how you want to play it Internet, then that's the way we'll play it!



I will not show the new picture of my advancing fingernail injury until my demands are met!

No one will see the state of my finger wound without paying the king's ransom I now set.


I demand


ONE


views of this post before I show my latest finger update!


Ha ha ha ha ha! Yes, it's evil, but what do I care any...


Oh.


We did it?


Already?


Jesus, it's almost scary how fast this ransom thing works! 

Here you go then:




















2 comments:

  1. OMG, the wound appears to be getting worse! Or maybe it has to go through these stages. Does it hurt? Do you spend hours and hours looking at its patterns of color? Does it taste like anything? Do you think your nail will fall off? Do the patrons at the library ever see it and comments? Should we 37 subscribers do some kind of intervention? Does it affect your typing?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sorry it has taken me so many minutes to get to your comment, but frankly I was stunned that we met the requirement for showing the picture so quickly! Wow!

      Anyway, to your questions:

      Yes, does kind of look worse.

      I think it is a stages/growing it out thing.

      Surprisingly no. I don't look at it so much and am sometimes surprised by it, like, what's that on my fingernail? Plus, oddly, the photos revealed a complexity to the wound not as visible to my naked eye.

      Nope, tastes like... nail.

      No, I don't think it will fall off, though I'm a little nervous about what happens when it grows out to the top!

      No one other than you has ever commented on it, including library patrons. Odd no? They're probably being super polite.

      Thank you. This is all the intervention I ever dreamed of.

      No, typing is fine. It only hurt the first day and a half, which is a long time ago now! I was able to type then, but it did hurt.

      Thank you for your questions.

      Delete

If you were wondering, yes, you should comment. Not only does it remind me that I must write in intelligible English because someone is actually reading what I write, but it is also a pleasure for me since I am interested in anything you have to say.

I respond to pretty much every comment. It's like a free personalized blog post!

One last detail: If you are commenting on a post more than two weeks old I have to go in and approve it. It's sort of a spam protection device. Also, rarely, a comment will go to spam on its own. Give either of those a day or two and your comment will show up on the blog.