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My Inspirational Person: Cara Santa Maria
If you watch The Young Turks, you’ve probably heard of her. If not, well, you have now.
She is my favorite scientist-turned-writer-turned-TV-personality.
Cara Santa Maria.
I’m going to put the phrase “Cara Santa Maria hot” in here just because I know that’s a phrase people are going to be Googling to find this page.
CSM was the senior science correspondent for the “Talk Nerdy to Me” series for The Huffington Post until April 2013.
According to wiki, she has a Masters in neuroscience and dated Bill Maher (Ugh, well, I don’t envy her taste in pretentious men.) for two years. She has done a lot of neuropsychology research including, “clinical psychological assessment, the neuropsychology of blindness, neuronal cell culture techniques, and computational neurophysiology.”
She is now pretty much a full-fledged member of the TYT cast.
So, she gives me inspiration for science jobs beyond research monkey.
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Another one of my favorite scientists that became a writer is Dr. Robert Sapolsky over at Stanford. He wrote Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: An Updated Guide to Stress, Stress Related Diseases, and Coping. Sapolsky did not trasnsition out of academia, but you can see in his Ted Talk that he is awesome at breaking complex topics down into highly accessible language.
I’ve blogged about him before.
He is arguably much less adorable than Cara Santa Maria.
Man, “senior science correspondent.” That’s a nice title.
A blogger can dream.
Happy 100,000 Hits Clantily Scad – Reflections on Blogging
When I was 14, I made a Geocities site. Although the content was embarrassingly 14-year-old (lists of inside jokes and collages of male celebrities), the layout didn’t look half bad, and it got better as I gained some rudimentary HTML and Photoshop skills. I’ve had an online journal in one form or another ever since for the last 9 years. But the newer incarnations had considerably less teen angst and BDSM squirrels.
My Old Xanga Banner
Some WordPressers obsess over their stats, seeking to maximize their page views, and publically posting data.
If you’re curious: I have 100K hits. This will be my 312th post. I have 418 comments, although to be fair, almost half of those are probably me replying to people. Most referral links come from Google, and the most popular posts are the ones on weird and controversial topics.
It’s been fun—learning what trends and what doesn’t, how to use tags effectively. But it’s not something about which I ever had huge hubris. I know I could have been more aggressive by commenting on other blogs and posting on random forums. But I know views alone don’t immediately result in quality comments or discussion.
Over the last year, I’ve noticed an increase in random “likes” and followings by other bloggers. There are a lot of terrible blogs out there, mostly from people who never made it past the level of my first Geocities site. So, if you’re reading this in your subscriptions and I didn’t follow or like you back, it’s probably because your blog is boring. I’m not interested in joining your little microcosm of bloggers’ circle jerking.
If I did follow you back, congrats. You’re above average.
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I was watching Girls on HBO. Otherwise known as Nepotism: That Show with Starring Famous Daughters.
The main character is a 24-year-old trustafarian who has a Bachelor’s in English. She approaches her boss at the place she’s been interning for two years and demands to be compensated for her services. He tells her he’ll be sorry to see her go.
“But Joy Lynn got hired after interning!”
“Yeah, well, Joy Lynn knows Photoshop.”
That’s when I realized that I have a shot at this game.
I can do typography (logos, banners, and professional shiz) but I can also Photoshop squirrels with giant balls holding barbeque lighters. I’d be a good PR rep for a small start-up, preferable ones that needs squirrels with giant balls.
I made a resume, which didn’t turn out quite as pathetic as I thought it would be. I can haz paid writing job?
P.S.
I Bought a Domain. What Now? Some Backstory Behind Clantily Scad.
As of this week, I own the domain name ClantilyScad.com. Anything scandalousmuffin.wordpress.com will redirect there. I love WordPress’s simple yet highly functional interface for blogging and I hope they continue being awesome.
I also played with the sub-header. It was formerly “Dyslexistentialist Musings of a Misanthropic Twat.” Now it’s “Dyslexistentalist Commentary of the Culturally Incorrect Kind.” [edit: made it even shorter] The truth is, albeit a being a pessimist with a penchant for sarcasm on the internet, I’m actually really a nice person and no one’s ever actually called me a twat.
Does having a domain name give me more legitimacy as a blogger? No, not really. Some of the best blogs I read have URLs that are dot wordpress or dot blogspot. But domain registration and mapping is pretty cheap these days, and I wanted to claim the eponymous URL before someone else did.
About the Name of the Blog.
Scantily Clad -> Clantily Scad is an example of metathesis, the reversal of consonant sounds in adjacent words.
Dyslexic + Existentialist = Dyslexistentialist is an example of portmanteau, the melding of two words, sound and meaning, into one. It’s a reference to my disorganized writing style and penchant for struggling with the meaning of the everything.
I can’t claim credit for the title. Back in 2008, when I wanted to start a non-autobiographical blog, I asked my friends on Livejournal what it should be named. My friend Sara suggested “Clantily Scad.” I liked the title and so it was. This was my first post ever.
Why is Everything is Sexual Innuendo with You?
I don’t think scantily scad/clantily scad is a necessarily sexual. Or everything is sexual. I don’t know; it’s probably the latter. Freud.
My internet handle, scandalousmuffin, is old. A combination of a couple nicknames from high school. I don’t really like it anymore, but I can assure you, it was not meant as a reference to vagina.
A big search term that people try to find my site is “scad porn.” These people are stupid. “Scad porn” is not a thing. They’re probably thinking of scat porn, because nothing says true love like being covered in human feces. Sorry to disappoint, pervs.
What Now?
One of the things I’ve been struggling with is what direction I should take with the blog.
I recognize that I don’t have a consistent theme or style. This is probably the primary reason I don’t have a lot subscribers despite certain posts garnering a lot of attention and comments. Some posts are fluffy and others are highly technical. Some are for pure amusement and others tackle serious issues. Some are satirical and others couldn’t be more concrete. Some are simply re-blogs of popular columnists I’m into at the moment and others are autobiographical essays.
Since I was all Freudian earlier, I think I should mention that one things I’ve been thinking of writing more on, but feel would be out of place on the blog is sex. The issue is that I feel like the overlap of people that want to read about Kink and Keynesian Economics in the same blog consists of just me.
It’s evolving. I’ll figure out. I’ll never stop writing.
And to my subscribers/bookmarkers/online stalkers, here’s a picture that I didn’t make but it still applies to you:
Writing Tip for Friday – from the Writers of South Park
^Video in the link. Matt Stone and Trey Parker know that telling a good story is all about flow. A story is not about things happening right after one another. Things happen and these things affect the subsequent things, keeping the plot flowing the viewer engaged. (Yeah, take that Family Guy.) Some great, classic advice right there.
I might break my cheapskate streak and upgrade my WordPress account soon, because this inability to embed non-youtube videos is pissing me off.
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