This New Thing

Marketing / Advertising, Morons & Idiots

Probably the modern word I hate the most is this “influencer” tag.  Fuck me, every totty with some kind of EeewwwChoob / TikTwat channel is now suddenly an “influencer” because her views of makeup / clothing / (whatever fad the younger audience of today are obsessed with) seem to cause advertisers to swoon with delight, according to the number of “followers” they are supposed to have according to some impenetrable measurement method.

There’s nothing wrong with the latter, of course:  the Nielsen ratings were once the yardstick whereby advertisers could approportion their spending among the various TV stations and shows according to the shows’ audience size.

Or maybe it’s just sour grapes on my part, because these (mostly-brainless) girls are raking in the cash with their “content” — the latter being nothing but opinion (largely shaped, I assume, by the brands’ sponsorship of such).  And apparently, being beautiful with large breasts increases their allure (no idea why).

I find it interesting that male “influencers” tend to have more actual content on their shows;  the wonderfully-low-class Mat Armstrong, for example, has made hundreds of thousands of dollars (okay, pounds sterling) out of repairing crashed supercars — he’s just bought a house in England and another in Miami, so we can safely assume that his business is profitable —  while stalwarts like Garand Thumb (two guys with actual expertise, being former SpecFor and Ranger operators) skimp along, apparently, with sponsorships from various gunny-type companies (but have a lot of fun along the way).

I suppose that even I could call myself an influencer, judging by the number of (tongue-in-cheek) complaints from people over the years, wailing about how they were perfectly happy with their firearms until they came to this website and were compelled — forced, even — to buy yet another gun they didn’t know they needed until I spoke glowingly about its allure and excellent qualities.

Did I get any kind of remuneration from this “influencing”?  Don’t be ridiculous.

So yes, maybe I am jealous that today’s influencers make money hand over fist each week while I have made, at a rough guess, a few thousand dollars — over twenty years — from my type of influencing.

Of course, my own cussedness hasn’t helped, in that I refuse to take on advertising (I did, once, very briefly for a few months during the NoR days, until an advertiser complained that I’d said Bad Things about his industry and I told him to fuck off and pulled the plug on the whole thing).  Ditto sponsorships, mostly because gun companies don’t need me when they have “gun writers” to pimp their products via the various gun magazines, but also because I absolutely refuse to be tied to any kind of influence over my opinions on, well, anything.

It also doesn’t help that my “likes” are confined to a really small list of products and such, either.

So I guess I am and have been my own worst enemy in this regard.

Oh well.

Here’s an unsolicited (and unpaid-for) recommendation (link in pic):

It’s a pre-WWII Sempert & Krieghoff tube-fed semi-auto chambered in 8x60mm, and it’s so beautiful it makes me swoon like a schoolgirl groupie.   Okay, at $17,500 it’s not the cheapest gun you could buy, and good luck finding the obscure 8x60mm S ammo anywhere, which means it’s strictly for reloaders.

And its performance is pretty much on a par with its smaller 8x57mm Mauser cousin, which is plentiful and can be fired far more cheaply from rifles like this mil-surp K98k:

…which are sold everywhere and can be had for under $1,000.

But you have to admit, that one-of-a-kind Sempert sure is pretty.  If you do decide to buy it, mention my name to the folks at Collectors, which will result in nothing more than a “who?” from them and not a single penny of kickback to me.

Par for the course, really.

9 comments

  1. There are a few gun writers that I like. I like reading Skeeter Skelton’s collected works. I also enjoy Tank Hoover’s writings and Brian Pearce’s writings. I found John Taffin to be very arrogant with his “to those who know, no explanation is necessary to those who know and to those who don’t know then no explanation is possible.” A couple other writers are good. Garand Thumb is pretty good. The gun rags even admit that if a gun sucks, it gets sent back with no review published.

    Influencers on other subjects like restaurants and such are all best ignored

  2. We are of the right age that we’ve seen how the internet has changed the world. Hundreds of examples. Let’s talk old cars. Used to, you’d see an old junker besides someone’s house and think, I could buy that for several hundred dollars, spend maybe another 5 grand fixing it up, and then I’d have a decent cool ride. Now? Well the owners just saw a mint condition example go across auction for $100k and now they want $20k for what is essentially a pile of broken parts with a VIN tag. No thanks.

    eBay has fucked things up too. Some old whatchamacallit won’t fetch 50 cents a a garage sale, but you can now put it on eBay and some collector halfway around the globe just has to have it and will pay you $50 plus shipping. Woo-hoo. As a collector, you can now find almost anything but it’ll cost way more than it’s worth. There’s good and bad there, but no going back.

    And women? Try going to a local poolhall and offering some chick $1 just to see her tits. That’ll get you punched in the face. But that same woman today can go online and get 10,000 men to each give her one dollar and she’ll show way more than just her tits. Cause hey, now it’s $10k for the strip show. If she’s really good looking, maybe that’s $100k. Wow. On the men’s side, each individual is thinking hey, it’s just a dollar. But she gets rich off of it.

    Of course she has to lie and call herself an “influencer”, which is basically a fancy big word for whore, but then again she’s a rich whore and money has a quality all it’s own in that sense. IDK. It’s a Pandora’s box we have and it’ll continue changing the world. You can’t go wrong assuming everything will eventually devolve to the lowest common denominator.

    Sometimes I think I would pay good money to time-machine my ass back to the 60’s and allow myself to live out retirement in that era instead. At least they knew the difference between boys and girls and hated commies.

  3. “Did I get any kind of remuneration from this “influencing”? ”

    Hell yeah you do….you get all our “influncer” opinions right here for free.

    They may not buy you any stuff, but think of all the cussedness support you get. 😀

  4. You should be getting a residual from Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz.

    You’re repeatedly influencing a lot of middle-aged men to commit carnal acts with them.

    That surely is worth some $$$.

  5. Pingback: Thousands? – Musings from Brian J. Noggle

  6. Strictly for reloaders.
    My Argentine Remington Rolling Block in .43 Spanish. Yahoo.

    Last I looked, just out of morbid curiosity, new brass was $4/per each.

  7. I do not need another boutique caliber to load. The 44 GAP and 6.8 SPC are two I already load. Anytime I run across a good deal on 6.8 I will buy another 500 rounds just for the brass. I am set on GAP brass.

    BTW: Lee reloading equipment can produce loaded cases but just about everybody else in the business makes much better equipment. Redding, RCBS, or Dillon are my top 3 choices for reload equipment.

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