Month: May 2024

I know it seems like about 3 weeks ago, but “The Pandemic” was 4 years ago now and that seems insane to me. I swear it was barely yesterday we were doing happy hours on Zoom and my usual routine of coughing to cover a fart was turned completely on it’s head.

When I think about that period of time I think about a few things, firstly my absolute dependence on Busch Light, truly the cheapest beer I have drunk since I was 15, secondly the sheer boredom of never leaving my house or doing anything of any note whatsoever. Finally and most relevant for this 10 minutes of nonsense, I think of Tiger King.

Writing this for a sort of mid-Atlantic audience I often find myself describing things for both Americans and Brits. I do not think I need to do this with Joe Exotic and Tiger King. For a solid 3 months, Tiger King was everything and everywhere. I hate watching shows everyone says I have to watch. I have never seen one episode of Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, The Wire or The Sopranos. If everyone tells me I MUST watch something it has the complete opposite effect on me, but this was during the pandemic, there was no sport to watch nobody was making any TV so there were reasons I caved and watched it.

I could not go one terribly forced Zoom call to someone without them telling me that it was the craziest thing ever and that I wouldn’t believe what I was watching. As Laura was on every single one of those Zoom calls with me and she has a lot more control over the TV than she would admit I caved and watched it.

Side note here, Laura would argue that she does not control the TV. In the past 3 months I’ve watched no less than 14 seasons of “Sister Wives”, 2 seasons of “Selling OC” and I am now 3 seasons into a show called “This is us” which makes literally no sense to me whatsoever. So any arguments that she doesn’t control the TV should be dismissed out of hand immediately.

Anyway on what felt like day 1643 of getting up, putting shorts on, cracking a beer and sitting on my couch until it was time to go back to bed we started Tiger King. For once, every person who told me to watch it was right. It was incredible, we watched the show, the making of the show, the Netflix watch party of the show, YouTube videos on the show, YouTube videos of people watching the show…. Fuck me it was a desperate time to be alive.. For a solid 3 weeks we came up with theories, looked at whether when life returned we could drive the 90 minutes to Carole Baskin’s sanctuary and even entered an online Pub Trivia night based around the show… Again thinking back, it was the most incredibly desperate time of my life..

Then just as quickly as Joe Exotic’s polyamorous gay marriage entered our lives it disappeared. Slowly life got back to normal and I was no longer trying to work out how much money the person who had their arm ripped off by the tiger got and whether or not I would take that amount to lose my left arm. I started leaving the house again and apart from a complete and utter suspicion of every other human in my sight for about 18 months and having to remember how to drive again everything was kind of like it was before Covid, just a bit different.

The other thing I did whilst sat on my fat ass at home was get stupidly into cryptocurrency. I watched videos, I bought some Ethereum and became “that guy”, the one with a surface knowledge of a topic who spent hours trying to convince his wife we could retire in 4 months if we just remortgaged the house and put it in to Crypto.

Around about a year later both of these things had disappeared from my life, replaced by cruises or darts or the new dog or whatever the random specific thing I was interested in for 3 weeks was at that time. Apparently I haven’t got ADHD, but if I haven’t then fuck knows how anyone who has got it functions. I can’t even write one of these blogs without at least three “side notes” (The irony of this being a side note is not lost on me)

Imagine my surprise when one day I was scrolling through Twitter, desperately trying to get my immediate hit of dopamine when I saw a tweet from a crypto influencer I had followed tweeting randomly about whether or not there would be a Tiger King season 2. Two completely unrelated things, or so I thought…

The next day he announced that TKING, the Tiger King crypto currency was being launched. I didn’t know how, I didn’t know why but I knew right then I wanted some. It was a Thursday night and I spent 3 hours researching and figuring out how to buy it. I bought $200 worth there and then.

We were doing a little staycation that weekend and by Saturday at about 3pm I was 14 Miami Vices in, floating round the lazy river, the thought of my $200 the furthest thing from my mind. We went upstairs to get ready for dinner and as is often the case I was waiting for the ladies in my life to get ready, so I thought I would check if it was still worth $200 or if I had wasted it.

I opened the laptop, jumped through the many hoops needed to confirm my identity and for just a second couldn’t breathe. I was up to $1,000, in 2 days!

From that point I was balls in. I joined message groups, I spent my evenings researching how much I could make, it became my life. The general chat around it was that if they announced a second season we would be millionaires and the day the 2nd season actually came out we would be billionaires.

I remember it like it was yesterday the day the second season was announced. We were on the boat from New York City to the Statue of Liberty and I saw the tweet. Everyone else was staring at Lady Liberty (Much cleaner than I expected) and I was logging in to some random app on my phone to see where we were at. My $200 was worth $20,000.

I wanted out. A brief chat with Laura and 25 minutes dicking around trying to sell it and I took half which was useful timing as I was in New York and that profit covered about 1/3 of my Uber bill for the weekend.

What this meant was though I had $10k still in there just waiting for November 18th when Season 2 came out and it was mentioned in the show! I was going to be able to retire.

November 18th came and I was going to Washington for a work conference but was ready to cash out, until I herniated 3 disks in my back going through security at Orlando Airport, was blue lighted down the runway, taken to the nearest hospital and dosed up on enough Morphine to keep me asleep for two days.

When I came too the first thing I wanted was not my doting wife, or children (just as well really because none of them were there) but my phone to see how rich I was.

Well season 2 was shit, they didn’t mention the coin once and my $10k was now worth $5 oh and I had a $9,900 hospital bill. The coin had gone up over 10,000% at one point yet I still came out of it $100 worse off than when I started. I looked at the historical prices as some sort of sick prank on myself. At the exact time I was in the ambulance my coins had been worth over $50,000. When I figured it out I nearly asked for more morphine.

I’ve never heard of Joe Exotic since that day and frankly if I never do hear his name again it will be too soon.

Writing the three different blogs I have over the last 11 years or so I used them as a bit of an outlet really. They were never meant to be anything more than me getting things off my chest, an outlet for things that were bugging me, or documenting the stupid stuff that happens to us.

I never expected or desired to go particularly “viral”, especially at first. The first one I wrote about what a nightmare it was to get the train to London did actually get more popular than I thought it would and whilst I wouldn’t say it went viral, it was getting a lot of views, comments and I could have monetized it if we had stayed in England.

The second blog about our time in Houston also did fairly well. Recently I was speaking to another expat friend who read it when they lived in Singapore. We didn’t know them at the time I wrote it and it randomly came up in conversation a few weeks ago. That was a bit of a surprise to me and made me realize that with a bit more self promotion and more regular commitment to actually writing I could perhaps grow something.

The Shroders in Florida grew into a Youtube channel, right around the time the kids got into watching random people play Minecraft online and make millions of dollars. A wonderful time in my life when Freddie wasn’t in any way self-conscious, would film a load of the content for me and like everything I get into for 15 minutes I spent a load of money on a Macbook, GoPro, editing software and royalty free music. Again I wanted to use this as a way of documenting the stuff we do. Sort of like a family album that I can look back on when I’m even greyer and even older. I didn’t expect to make money or become famous, but I did look into what I needed in order to do so. At that time I needed 100 subscribers to be accepted into the monetization program. (It has changed significantly since)

100 measily subscribers. I have 6 Gmail addresses, so that was an easy 6, just 94 to go. Friends and family should get me close, then a few stragglers should have got me there. Editing videos is time consuming and I am shit at it. Our videos were too long, they were all about cruises, nobody gave a shit and right now I sit at 58 measily subscribers. Remember that number, it is important later.

I set up a Facebook creator page, a Twitter account and all sorts to try and promote it, but to be honest I don’t like over self promotion, the Facebook page has 209 followers. Again, remember that number.

I tell you all this for a reason. Not just to vent about how I can’t seem to get anywhere. I know the reason why. I don’t post regularly on either here or YouTube, our content is niche to say the least and the editing is awful. In fact I am not even allowed to make anymore videos. Kids being the horrible little shits they are, especially teenage kids, found the YouTube page and the upshot of that is Fred is not so keen on being involved at all anymore, so instead of uploading these videos I now have 45 hours of random footage saved on multiple hard drives around my house.

The reason I am venting about this is that it appears Laura through no effort whatsoever has achieved a level in social media fame that no amount of witty blogs or 35 minute videos of random cruise ships could ever achieve. She is now an accredited Facebook creator with over 700 followers and is on the verge of qualifying for monetization.

How did this happen? Well last year we went back to England, nobody really knew, especially Laura’s Mum and Dad, it was a suprise trip some 4 weeks after Laura’s Mum’s 70th birthday. We snuck round to their house and Laura asked me to film her knocking on the door and surprising them. There was zero discussion of what this would look like, what the plan was, just point and shoot.

We got there nice and quietly, Laura walked to the door, me filming the entire time. Her Dad was sitting outside and one child ran straight over to surprise him. Laura banging on the door at the same time. As the front door opened a noise so high pitched not even dogs could hear it screeched “HAPPPPYYY 70TH BIRTHDAY!!!”

That was the whole video. 35 seconds tops. Laura uploaded it to her facebook and we thought nothing more of it. There were a few nice comments and likes, but other than the children constantly mocking Laura’s high pitched screech over the last year we never thought about it again. I mean it wasn’t even her Birthday, that had been weeks previous.

That was until last night.

Sitting on the sofa, flicking through her phone Laura tells me about a notification she has received from Facebook. She get’s hundreds of Facebook notifications, we are borderline boomers. Instagram and TikTok mean nothing to us, Facebook is our Social Media of choice and Laura is balls deep in Facebook every minute of the day she isn’t on the phone to her friend Gail. We basically at this point live totally separate lives, 8 inches apart on the sofa. Some crappy Netflix show or documentary on, Laura scrolling through 30 second reels, occasionally asking me to summarize the entire motivations of the main protagnist in the 14th serial killer documentary we have watched in 15 seconds, before just telling me he was sexually driven despite not watching a minute of it.

This notification though warranted her stopping scrolling and telling me, so it had to be important.

It turns out Facebook has identified her and then certified her as a “Digital Creator” off the back of one completely unedited 35 second reel. That one reel that is so high pitched every time it gets played in this house bats circle us for an hour has led her to over 700 followers.

3 and a half times more followers than The Shroders in Florida Facebook page which I actually spent time and effort crafting.

Marriage should be about celebrating each others successes, If Laura is successful then I am successful and vice versa. Bollocks to that. I am seething about this.

I estimate that I have put in about 100 hours, writing, re-writing, filming, editing, uploading even some planning for the sake of 200 people occasionally looking and significantly less watching any of the YouTube videos. Laura doesn’t even film this video and all of a sudden the checks from Zuckerberg are about to come rolling in.

700 followers off the back of one video. I’ve watched this video 100 times now I can’t understand it at all.

Laura has embraced this new found fame as only she knows how. Diving deep into analytics that she has no clue what they mean. Sharing really God awful reels other people have done then checking the “Dashboard” to see what “Engagement” she has got. Literally two days ago she had no idea about any of this, now she is the next Mr Beast.

Jealousy is not a great trait, I am not jealous really but I am pissed off. I might be biased but I have put out some top tier content. I have been expecting calls from publishers for at least 6 years now and nothing but crickets and the occasional phone call from the “Best Supporting Actress” of Laura’s viral masterpiece her mum, telling me she almost literally pissed herself at my recounting of me getting stung in the right nut by a rogue bee or Laura flooding the back yard.

So I have made a decision, I think I am gonna put out some reels of me ranting in my car… I can’t put up with being married to an influencer with a bigger following than me, or I am going to hijack her profile and put a video out calling all her followers inbred assholes. Either way I will have more followers!!!