Tag: blogging

AI and Blaze

~ Veselin ~ 14 Comments

The AI ad generator outperformed me in Blaze.

Blaze is WordPress.com’s internal ad system (Tools > Advertising). I decided to give it a try and ran 2 campaigns. The first was for a random Book post with an AI generated ad, and the second was for one of my best long reads with a hand-crafted ad copy.

The AI-generated one had a $0.3 CPC compared to $0.56 for my post. I also got fewer impressions.

The CPC that I achieved was okay but my blog is not a business, and doesn’t deserve it yet.

You Are Deadpool

~ Veselin ~ 5 Comments

An adventure gamebook in the shape of a comic book. Best of both worlds 🙂 It has 5 sub-stories, each with 100-ish episodes.

September starts strong with a 5/5 book that I would not dare to review. It’s Deadpool. I hate superheroes but Deadpool hates them too, so I think it’s fine.

The August Pile of Books

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

I read 9 books in August. Pretty happy with that achievement, although two of these were very short.

Best books

  • The Dry by Jane Harper, and the series about Aaron Falk. It’s a quiet mystery — cozy and depressing — that doesn’t fit the usual mold. I enjoy books with a lyrical style, where the story is secondary to the writing itself. Jonathan Moore writes like that.
  • The Goblins Return by Lubomir Nikolov. It’s a fun and refreshing gamebook that touched my childhood memories. The book’s content aged well, though the pages were yellow and brittle.

Worst books

  • Six of Crows – a popular young adult novel where teenagers act like elderly gang members. There’s a 17-year-old leader with a cane who is too mature to have a girlfriend. Nobody has acne or other problems appropriate for their age. The storytelling was nice and smooth but the details felt dubious. I think the good execution compensates for the bad details and gave it 4/5.
  • Orconomics – some people walk around in a fantasy world and wait for the main character to awaken as The Red Beard. I’m actually looking forward to the continuation. The Red Beard was kind of cool and the absurd world can be a feature.

The Goblins Return

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment

Found this gem on Facebook. Fresh humor on yellow pages that barely hold. I enjoyed it very much. Not sure if it can endure another read without starting to fall apart. But the book was cool, well written, short, and brought me good memories.

I finished the monumental Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo yesterday and my original plan was to blog about it today but then I read the above book to fix the my tastebuds. The Goblins deserve a post, and the Six of Crows can be left to less critical book bloggers.