Website Progression

I've really come down with the PTC (paid-to-click) bug lately.  After about 40 days of trying them out I've made a small amount of money, not too bad considering that you have to reinvest your earnings to make bigger amounts of money.

On NeoBux I had a sizable amount of money made through completing side tasks on CrowdFlower in addition to referrals and my own clicks.  I was trying to rent more referrals but after you become a premium member there's a weird system for obtaining them.  I got frustrated that I couldn't get any and used an express queue that costs almost twice as normal.  This wiped half of what I had at that point, which was only $40 total, but I had to extend the contracts of my referrals, which is eating up the pile I had accumulated.  Its a little deflating to see the amount I'd built up over the month disappear, but its a wonderful lesson.  I was suspecting I was growing too fast and this confirms it.  However, I've reached the cap for the lowest level of referrals and if I buy anymore its gonna cost a little more extra to buy and rent them, so I should just sit where I'm at and learn to manage my people properly.

Slightly dejected from my NeoBux experiments, I opened an account with Twickerz and I think I found a hidden gem.  Its consider legit and has been around for 2 years, but its relatively unknown.  Its very similar to NeoBux but there's a few tweaks to their system.  They have a premium system as well, but the lowest memberships cost $10 and $20, and you can jump in and start at whatever level you want.  Its recommended that you buy at least the lowest level if you wanna try it out for yourselves.

Twickers has plenty of ads to click in the course of the day, much more than NeoBux, and one gets points for every click that can be used to purchase account upgrades or even cash.  Twickerz has a variety of offers such as CrowdFlower tasks, surveys, and offers, but also has my personal favorite:  Virool videos.  Just click on the video links and you get a Twick Coin for letting it play to the end.  I just lower the volume and let them play since I do these PTC sites on a laptop while watching TV anyways.  Each Twick Coin is equal to half a penny, but it takes 30 days for the coins to validate and come to your account.  I've made almost $1.25 in Coin the last ten days, but have to wait for them trickle into my account.  Also of note is Twickerz Click Grid, a game of chance.  Members get 25-50 free clicks a day on a grid to try for prizes.  Other sites have these, but Twickerz seems to pay out more often than Clixsense and I've made 60 cents in the last 10 days, whereas I've never won anything but extra spin on other sites.  Is that really a prize when that's extra advertising clicks for the host?

These are just the bread and butter of Twickerz and is somewhat common among many PTC websites.  However, I've found a hidden gem on the site that I can't believe is real.  Twickerz allows users to invest money into ad shares for $10 each and generates a guaranteed $15 in 150 days.  While I'm unsure if this is a daily amount or equals 10 cents a day this is a very powerful product to get into.  Unlike referral renting, which Twickerz readily offers, there's no cost associated other than the original investment.  Referrals cost 20 cents to buy, but extending contracts and autopaying them costs money and its possible to lose money due to unproductive referrals.  Twickers is offering a 50% return on an investment which is unlike what I've seen from other PTC sites.  The drawback?  These can only be bought from your main account, meaning you have to actually generate $10 from the site before buying one.  With referrals, one can load money from Paypal onto an account and begin purchasing them, but Twickerz wants to ensure that only people who actively generate money have access to this wonderful offer.  If one chooses to try out Twickerz I highly suggest shooting for one of this Ad shares!  Already I've made it up to $3.00 on Twickerz in 10 days and am hoping to get some shares within the month.

My journey continues and I hope to keep everyone updated to my adventures into PTC land.  If you wanna try out Twickerz try signing up under me and we can discuss strategies to success:

http://www.twickerz.com/?ref=morteolx

Procrastinating For Fun and Profit

A few weeks ago I was preparing for Finals week and found myself talking to a German girl on Chat Roulette while avoiding my studies. Don't work, I ended up getting B's afterall.

 The girl I spoke with had stomach surgery and was laid up in a Romanian flat, she was in too much pain to do anything but couldn't fall asleep either. In a meandering conversation ranging from Transylvania and vampires to why Romanian men are evil she mentioned that she made money by stripping online and using pay-to-click websites. As a pudgy male slowly creeping into his middle-ages I was intrigued how this pay-to-click website thing worked. She mentioned a site called Neobux and I did some research to find out what it was. Apparently its the biggest site of this kind and has paid out money over the past 6 years with no complaints. I decided to register and give it a go to see how it all worked. All I needed was a Paypal account and a functioning e-mail account and I was set. I clicked few ads and made a few cents. Yippee.

The FAQs I read for the site basically said "Keep clicking ads and in about 3 weeks you'll have enough money to rent referrals and make residual income." I was fully prepared to do this but was clicking around the site and found an interesting button: mini jobs. This took me to a menu and there was a host of simple tasks that netted a few pennies each, much more than what the ads offered. One page tasked one to write answers to 4 or 5 questions for a penny. However, if the answers were adequate a bonus would be given. I plunged deep into a procrastination hole and filled out tons of these questions, mostly since this was more interesting than Physics or Anatomy notes. After filling out countless queries about where to found recipes and the common symptoms of various diseases I gave up and went to bed.

The next day my account balance was over $8.

Sure, its a small sum for a meaningful amount of work, but I have a laptop and a TV that plays Netflix, so its no deal for me to use both at once. Compared to the FAQs I was reading it felt like I was playing a game with cheat codes. I've managed to rack up a good deal of money in less than a month. I mention this to people at work and their eyes just glaze over, apparently this scheme only appeals to me. Yet I trudge on. 

***SHAMELESS PLUG AHEAD***

If you'd like to try this out go ahead and click on the banner at the top. If you don't have a Paypal account, or feel creeped out about giving to a random website, there's one on the left to Clixsense. Its a comparable site to Neobux but they can mail checks out to an address of your choosing. Just to be above the board, using my referral links helps me out. These sites are two of the oldest and most reliable sites of this kind I've found. As a bonus, if you refer me I'll be happy to chat with you about the sites and give a tip or two out. 

And if you don't wanna do it? Whatever. I'm kinda funny, keep on reading my stupid blog.

Lunch at Jenny Craig's

When I was in tenth grade I was basically a nerd in denial. I took a zero-hour chemistry course that was well before any sane person came to school. The class was full of Type-A students and seniors on the verge of dropping out. My lab table was the most diverse with a black kid named Marcus and a Korean named Jinn who were both skaters/sci-fi/anime geeks very similar to me. In between shoving thermometers into mystery liquids we'd talk about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dragon Ball, and video games. One day Jinn invited me to come over the his house to watch movies, whatever kids our age did. I went over on a Saturday, greeted by a Korean mom and a White dad, pretty typical stuff. We went to Jinn's room and something seemed a bit off. There were Dragon Ball wall scrolls, a set of Japanese action figures and the like, but there was some Sailor Moon posters and the room was a little too... pink? Jinn fired up his computer and showed me some ROMs he had and we talked about some manga he got from Asia when he visited some family members. Suddenly the door opened and the mother poked her head into the room.

"Jenny, I told you if you're having boys over you need to keep your door open."
"Sorry, Mom."

I can't remember if or what expression passed on my face in that moment. Jinn was Jenny? I heard the name 'Jenny Craig' thrown around at school a lot, but never in my chemistry class. People even TOLD ME I knew Jenny Craig, but I always pictured a chubby white girl and shrugged it off. But here I was, essentially meeting Jenny Craig for the first time. In her bedroom with Sailor Moon silently judging me. This was perhaps the first of several times where I felt like I was tricked into a date.

We ate some grilled cheese, watched some kind of movie in her room, and I'm not really sure when I left or how long I'd been there, but I never went out with Jenny Craig ever again.

The Water Bottle Squeeze Trick

All too often I get off of work late at night only hurry to my local coffee shop and lay some bullshit stories out for the poor guy running the counter. The Taylor kid suggested I write some crap online, embellish things, then $$$. I just remembered I had this blog where I bitched mostly about my Mother but hadn't updated it in a year. I don't know where the money comes in, but here's some tales of The Dude Named Vince.

I was routing around the back of the work fridge and found a bunch of water bottles I bought and left there a few months back. They piled up in the bottom tray and were ignored during fridge cleanings. I was really thirsty, so I grabbed a bottle and tried to twist off the cap to no avail. The things was bulging out, super pressurized, I would not come off. I gave it to a few people to try and open but nobody, not even a girl, could open it. A coworker, Michael, decided that releasing the pressure would make the task easier. He shoved a syringe into the side with an audible snap. The cap still wouldn't twist off but the stupid bottle was leaking now. I held the bottle sideways to prevent it from getting water all over my stuff and occasionally held the hole up to my face and squeezed a small stream of water out. Just hearing the sound, Michael commented that it made him want to take a piss. Walking around the office I kneeled next to Ludwig and whispered to him, "Do you know what it sounds like when I piss into peoples' mouths?" He made a face of disgust and gave me a dirty look. While looking him in the eye I squeezed the bottle into my open mouth, echoing the sound of peeing into a toilet. He was totally freaked out as I walked away to wander around the hospital a bit more.

Skittering Thoughts

I've been whining in the past about my lack of companionship, but recent event have come to light that I had forgot about until now. A girl or two have tried to hug me at work and I've had incidental brushes against various people lately. It seems I forgot how much I cringe when people touch me. I've somehow forgotten how much I hate to be touched, but its still there. All those little details about me I ignored when I melted away into the military are beginning to resurface, parts of myself I've hidden away for whatever reasons. Ever since I was young I shied away from physical contact, but I'd learned that telling people you don't want to be touched just caused them to want to tough you all the more. In a self-discovery phase in the hazy period around college I started to hug everyone I knew when saying hello. To conquer a fear of touching, I think. But then it was Air Force time, and they don't appreciate gay stuff like hugs in the armed forces. So hear I am. Nearly thirty and incredibly uptight whenever anyone comes to close to me.

A Fractured Summation Upon "Wholes and Holes"

Years ago in my lost and drunken odyssey after college I had a discussion with my ex-roommate and current friend Matt. I believe I wrote it down in a lost notebook, so please forgive me if I can't quite remember the details. "Wholes and Holes" was a sloppy pun relating two extreme type of people. Holes are people with a profound sense of lacking in their lives at a sub-conscious level. Being weak willed and needy they sought out their opposite, a 'whole person', to help fill the void in their souls. The total sum of one Whole and one Hole was half a person between two individuals. We concluded it was better to become a Whole person if one managed to avoid the empty Holes of the world. This conclusion was based upon the belief that such a thing as a 'Whole person' existed, which I now believe isn't so.

The Human Condition is horrible indeed and all people have holes within themselves that leads to a hunger for specific intangibles: Love, Respect, Adoration, Safety and Security, among others. The key is a need for the intangible, something one cannot hold or view. We can see through Maslow's Pyramid that as basic needs are met an individuals' attention scales up to the intangible. It can be argued that this hunger is the will that drives humans and these needs are the core of what it is to be human. What I once thought of as a Whole person, one essentially satiating every one of their needs, would be an unchanging, homeostatic state akin to death.

In essence, all living people are filled with an emptiness we are compelled to fill to relieve the tension caused by existence, this is the Human Condition as near as I can define it. The essential question an individual need ponder is the method one goes about filling their voids. Once I thought it foolish to depend upon others for our needs, but as communal creatures, to deny man's need to depend upon others is to deny his nature. All of us entered this world at our most vulnerable, the first first thing we require as newborns is Love at its most primal: food and body heat from our mothers' breast. Denying our reliance on others is equivalent to denying our most basic needs, and thus accepting our deaths.

Perhaps this 'lesson' is of a private sort, me just clearing the cobwebs between my ears. For the longest time I've hardened myself to others, striving to need no one but myself, to put no other before myself, but to that end I'm slowly becoming the male equivalent of a crone. Often it's been preached that seeking help is weak, but it's what we are meant to do. Perhaps the only thing left to consider is the method we choose to satisfy our appetites. That however plays into ethics and morality and is another matter entirely.

Just keep in mind: the living must hunger, and to be human is to suffer.

The Long, Melancholic Road Through Madness

I remember the first time I came to the realization that I was a very depressed person. It was in my old military days, studying a foreign language in the service of our country. A psychological screen on your profile was a total black mark on your profile, something to be avoided, and I pondered that for weeks before giving in to all the postings and briefings about depression we were made to sit through. I was falling behind in class. I was falling behind in physical training. I was growing sick within both body and soul. No one noticed, everyone was looking out for themselves and I was very good at masking myself due to the way I was raised. Growing up every look, every emotion was questioned until my natural face was blank. People think they're good at spotting liars and fakers, which makes them blind to it.

Taking the advice of the generic instructional videos and the monthly visit from the Chaplain I went to Chaplin Services to 'talk to someone who cares'. But I didn't have an appointment, so one was made and I came back in a week. He's busy today, may you come back next week? Week two after the breaking point and he was attending to urgent matters over a sick Airman. Week three or four, I forget how long it took, I walked out of his office slightly less depressed and infinitely more angered. I trudged on, making snide comments from back rows, studying nearly every waking moment under advisement from my superiors, all for the sake of... what?

They booted me from class while I was on bed rest from a mysterious illness. When I reported to grounds keeping duty and had my report card mailed to me, a B average. More sick call, confined to a small dorm room, and all I had was a small ball of hate growing inside me. I crafted 5-point letters railing against my school and instructors, petitioning my commanding officers about the indignation of my failure. I drank in my off-hours and unabashedly railed against people to the delight of others.

Sorrow and rage brewed in me like a slow venom, eating through my stomach and bowels. I had my way and was allowed to return to class, sicker, meaner. Anger and parasites brewed inside me as I sat through classes I'd already taken, but no one minded or cared. Argued with others needlessly and mocked people who didn't deserve it. I was vomiting constantly, but the clinic refused to acknowledge that anything was wrong. Perhaps the worst memory I harbor is nearly throwing up on the last woman I was intimate with, thoughts of love, of sex, permanently marred by the taste and burn of bile.

Like the Chaplin, I went to the clinic several times to seek help. This time I was called a liar and a faker for choosing such an unremarkable affliction. If my leg had hurt I'd receive vicodin and a free pass from afternoon exercise. Eventually I was given anti nausea pills whose side effects included chemical fueled nightmares. They stopped working and finally, when blood followed with the bile, I was seen by a doctor. The final medicant was essentially a pesticide. Reduced to a quivering, fevering mess I only slept with the door open, actually fearful of what would happen in my sleep. Purged of my ailment, the hate remained. It sat there, perhaps in the pit the bugs had burrowed into my stomach, festering and fermenting.

I flowed through the next years as in a stupor. Returning to Basic Training to learn how to fly? Nothing. Camping and mock torture in Survival School? Nothing. Being sent to Afghanistan, not fully trained? Nothing, both times.

I question where I'm at now. I feel empty and hollow, not quite the person I once was. Returning from the military to finish my education, those close to me comment how much I've changed with the passage of time. They say it like a compliment, as I maintain a blank face.