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Saturday, October 31, 2009

Dia de los Muertos? Try again later.

I'm not what you'd call a traditional celebrant of Dia de los Muertos, nor of All Hallows Eve, nor the festival of Samhein, or whatever October 31st might be called in your neck of the woods. Still, our little girl got all dressed up (you can check my wife's blog on Tuesday for data on that) so I did what I could with, say, no real time nor interest.

So that was me, in Ladera Heights and at the new Fox Hills Mall (Cinnabon! Woo hoo!) and over by Dorsey High, with a print out of the Fail Whale safety pinned to my chest, trailing behind the pregnant cat (kitties painted on the belly) and the magical, Afrocentric witch. I also said to anybody who asked, "Too many tweets! Sorry, try again later. Our technical staff is aware of the problem, and it should be fixed soon!"

Handle it.

Playing (Music): "Somebody's Watching Me" by Rockwell, feat. Michael Jackson on the choruses

UPDATED: How about a clearer look at my costume from my wife's blog?

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Ella Simone Tabu: The Sneak Preview

Today, the family drove down to Redondo Beach to get what's called a "4D sonogram" of our new addition (who's not a candy girl).

At first, she was reluctant to be seen before her world premiere ...

"... next time I'm in church, please, no photos ..."

... because she was sleepy. She probably had a long night, downloading information from god about how she was coming to run this planet ...

"... so if you're tired ... then go take a nap!"

But after a while, with her elder sister and her father speaking at her belly-home like it was a fast food drive in menu, she brightened up ...

"... tomorrow will bring, better you, better me ..."

... which led the tech to ask, "how did you make such a happy baby?"

It's hard work, every day, but we're doing it. Every day.

Playing (Music): "Who's Your Daddy" by Mook & Fair

Friday, October 2, 2009

The Erick Sermon of Blogging

The brown-eyed bandit can't stand it ...

I've decided that I should be the keynote speaker for BlogWorld 2012. It should also be held in Los Angeles, since I don't really have much interest in domestic travel (unless they hold it, say, somewhere really fly and they'll comp my whole family).

Anyway, yeah, I should be the keynote speaker. The topic of my speech will be a closely guarded secret until I step on stage, when the screen will light up with the display for it. It'll be awesome.

Why should I get such a huge stage from which to speak? When there's Huffington and Guy Kawasaki and Koz and even The Bloggess, why should they invite a guy who only had one book on the market as of 2009 and works on a website for a major nonprofit in a wholly non-creative capacity? The reason why is because, basically, I'm the Erick Sermon of blogging (and the whole internet, really, as I've done it all from telnetting into MUDs to building the bricks that make the web to doing tech support at Earthlink).


How so? Like E-Dub, I've got a respectable underground following (in both urban music circles and comics) but have rarely penetrated the mainstream. Like the Green-Eyed Bandit, I've gone gold but never platinum (at one point, I estimated that around 50,000 people a week read my work between the community newspaper I ran and two web columns, and I have more than 204,000 blog views on MySpace alone, which is none-too-shabby). Long before anybody ever put together "word" and "press," I was writing a weekly summary of my dating life called "Love Notes" on my Geocities site (which has now even mostly disappeared from the Wayback Machine), as far back as 1998, writing the pages individually in raw HTML and frames for the love of pie, much like Sermon put it down in the formative days of hip hop. On the strength of my opinions alone, I've been hired by not one but two major pop culture sites (two years at Underground Online and many, many more at Comic Book Resources -- much like Clive Davis' J Records brought on Def Squad. Don't even get me started on all the places my work's appeared, from Morphizm on out. I have a MySpace user number in the low six figures (the higher the number, the later you got on board), I was on Friendster before it invented the fail whale, and I'm all over Twitter like Jack Nicholson's all over 27-year-old starlets and bad calls at the Staples Center. All of that's similar to how many hits and stars have seen Erick Sermon's influence on their way to super stardom (despite the disturbing fact that my 19-year-old brother thought the only "hit" he'd ever had was "Music" after seeing it on the TV show Platinum -- which got a bad rap, by the way, no pun intended). Like the E-R-I-C-K, I've said things and done things some might think are wrong and I'm still here to tell the tale.

Dude, I'm kind of a big deal.

So I need a few more feathers for my cap and then they'll have to pick up the mickey fickey phone and dial. I'm working on two at once as Director of Online Marketing for Stranger Comics (the website's coming along, kids), which I'll have some more news about soon. I'm also throwing down in a major way here and on The Hundred and Four. It should be fine.

This is where you come in. You're reading this blog, so either you hate my freaking guts (which I'm totally cool with, by the way) or because you think my writing's pretty cool. Or you could be an ex stalking me, or some other type of weirdo stalking me, or in some very rare and unusual cases, you're somebody who dated or wants to date somebody I know and think that following whatever I write will give you some insight into them. Strange but true, it's happened, which reinforces my basic thesis: if you're so dope that you can make other people you just know parenthetically more visible on the global information marketplace, like semen on a blue dress, you're kind of the business, joe.

In any case, it's your job to a) get Blogworld 2012 to Los Angeles and b) get me put on as keynote speaker. As a reward for doing this, anybody who shows up at my keynote in 2012 and references this blog, I will take your email address and contact you so you can either get a hard or soft copy of an exclusive short story from my fourth book (which is about 25% written before I realized I needed to finish some of the other books first) The Last Testament, one that has never been seen by anyone outside of my disturbingly small "read this and make sure I'm not a complete hack" group of professional writers and editors.

My job? Continuing to support my brand position and drivin' y'all crazy with the stuff coming out of my brain.

We can do this! Let's get it crackin' and I'll see you at the LA Convention Center in fall 2012!

Playing (Music): "Bad Habits" by Maxwell

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