In the post two thousand MGK will thank all his readers for reading, or for looking at the pretty pictures if they cannot read, but the latter category will not be able to read the thanks and therefore feel resentful, except that they will not because they didn’t even know they were being thanked!
In the post two thousand commenters will again discuss their conspiracy theories about Flapjacks, but none of these theories will involve waffles – which is precisely his cunning plan!
In the post two thousand MGK will be all “thanks for reading even though now I work full-time and cannot devote four thousand words to Spider-Man on such a regular basis,” and then half his readership will go read Chris Sims instead!
In the post two thousand MGK will subtly mention that he is looking for new artists to collaborate with for ongoing projects, and then reiterate the fact that these positions are unpaid so as to not have the confusion that went on with some people last time!
In the post two thousand somebody will complain about all the So You Think You Can Dance posts, then somebody else will be all “well you don’t have to read everything,” and a huge flamewar will commence that will become internet genocide!
In the post two thousand MGK will quietly gloss over the fact that, although the vast bulk of the two thousand posts were his, other people wrote some of them when he was busy and stuff!
In the post two thousand people will wonder if we shouldn’t have waited for the 2500-post anniversary instead!
In the post two thousand somebody will say “and here’s to two thousand more,” but then they’ll think “well, that’s only four thousand, and nobody cares about four thousand,” so they will quickly say “no, wait, here’s to reaching five thousand instead” and then they’ll feel uncool!
(But seriously: it has been a blast, and here’s to… a bunch more.)
As is my wont, occasionally I ask people what they would like me to write up on here in this joint. So what would you all like? “I should write” requests, as always, will be ignored, and no guarantees are extended.
(I’d also ask for comment on the idea set forth in comments here, as that was not the first time people have expressed interest in a higher pagerate.)
According to I Write Like, apparently I write like Isaac Asimov, Stephen King, James Joyce, Agatha Christie, H.P. Lovecraft, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ian Fleming. There could be more, for all I know. Apparently I’m not that consistent.
The only consistent elements of this on a post-to-post basis are the following:
1.) Three Executives posts are all Agatha Christie. Which is eerie, because I’m pretty sure Agatha Christie never had a character who tried to eat gravel.
2.) Conversations with Flapjacks are always James Joyce. Which is eerier and a little freaky, to be honest.
3.) Stuff I write for Torontoist in “journalism mode” is Vonnegut. Which is the only element of the whole experiment I find flattering.
So somewhere on this site I’ve said that I’m willing to review products that are sent to me. This is for one major reason: I like getting free things. I am not at all ashamed of getting free things or being sent free things. If Apple wants to send me an iPad, I will review the fuck out of it. If the New Zealand Board of Tourism (or whatever they have. Presumably they have somebody who does tourism stuff) wants to buy me a trip to New Zealand to review, well, New Zealand, I am totally on board with that. I like getting things for free.
I mean, recently Torontoist was contacted by Kia Motors, who offered to send somebody to South Korea to review the new Kia Driveycar or whatever they made this year. Torontoist ultimately turned down the opportunity because they couldn’t find any reason the story was Toronto-related. I was all “but I’m from Toronto, surely that should count,” but ultimately journalistic integrity won the day because they are boring people with sticks up their asses who won’t let me go to South Korea to drive a car around a stunt track and do awesome skid turns. (I assume I would get the opportunity to drive the car around a stunt track and do skid turns. I mean, you got to figure Kia would want me to say nice things about them.) So you know I’m entirely willing to engage in the review process.
But I’ve got my limits. I say that right up front: I’m not going to be your marketing partner. If you want to send me something, that is awesome and I will review it in good faith and with an open mind. But guerrilla marketing is not something I engage in for anybody who is not me.1 If I get your product and I think it is shit, at best I will just not mention it on the site (and you’d have to be, like, really nice and send me homemade cookies because you’re so happy that I’m reviewing your thingy to get me to do that), and at worst I will say exactly how shit it is. That’s my line of integrity, right there.
Anyways. During my intense studytime, I was surprised to see this in my inbox:
This might be out of left field but I have a post idea I wanted to run by you. It’s quirky but something I think your readers might enjoy!
This opening is pretty common; I get a fair number of people who want me to post their Youtube or talk about their site. Sometimes I actually do it if I like whatever it is they’ve done. Not often, but sometimes.2
I want you to share your power anthem! Your anthem is an event or experience that changed you. It can be anything but I was thinking perhaps a wild night or a special event that changed you forever and left you feeling less than squeaky-clean. It can be anything so use your imagination. The point is, no matter what goes down AXE can fix you up.
Yes, that would be AXE as in “the crappy line of men’s beauty products.” People my age will remember that, when they were teenagers, Old Spice was the scent of desperate boys trying to get laid and who thought Old Spice would make them smell manly and intoxicating, rather than smelling like Old Spice. AXE is, more or less, this generation’s Old Spice, except instead of selling it with an aura of sophistication and dignity, they have gone with “we’re the brand for douchebags” as their selling point. Of course, AXE does reasonably well in the marketplace – or so I understand – so who am I to criticize them selling stuff to douchebags?
Of course, that is not the problem currently facing me right now; I don’t have to smell AXE. I am just reading an email and trying to figure out what the fuck this marketing campaign is supposed to be. As near as I can figure out, Marketing Person is asking me to take a bad experience and… use it to help them sell AXE. I don’t quite get this. “Hey, remember that time in your life when you were totally down in the dumps and feeling like a shitburger? We can use that to sell our product!” This makes no real sense as a marketing campaign to me.
And how is this a “power anthem,” anyway? I mean, when I think “power anthem,” I think something like this.
That is a power anthem. How does a bad time in my life have anything to do with Stan Bush? Stan Bush is all about the awesomest times in your very existence. Stan Bush is the radical kickflip that is your life. Sometimes, when I am depressed, I imagine what life would be like if I were Stan Bush, or maybe Rodimus Prime. Both are pretty much more excellent than anything you could possibly imagine.
Where was I? Oh, right. AXE. Okay, really, AXE is talking more about “hey, remember that time you partied so hard that you puked all over yourself and then you puked on your date and your date puked on the big guy and then the big guy puked on himself and he was so mad about the puke that he beat the shit out of you but that didn’t matter because you were already unconscious because you’d passed out because you’d partied so hard” variety of bad experience, the sort of Plan 9 From Outer Space or Manos: The Hands of Fate equivalent of so-bad-it’s-good experience. But these, too, are not power anthems. As was just cited, power anthems are so tubular that they force you to describe everything exclusively in parlance that either originated in the Eighties or was popularized at that time.
Confident your readers are interested in learning about your power anthem here’s what I hope you’ll be interested in doing:
First off, I’m pretty sure that if I stopped talking about comics which suck and/or rule that ninety percent of you would probably go find something else to read and most of the rest of you would only stick around in the hope of seeing El Tyrano Magnifico again.
But secondly, who the hell is interested in hearing about some distant-past emo dark time or pukefest in somebody else’s life? I mean, I don’t want to hear about emo dark times in the distant past from people I actually know and like in real life. (I’ll listen, of course, because that is what friends do, but I sure don’t look forward to it, and if you do you have issues.) And pukefests are all “you had to be there” things because we’ve all done it at one point or another and the minute details of the event are only funny to other people after the fact when you lie like a motherfucker and you’re all “oh man Stitz and Weasel and I we went out and we got so wasted that we stole police cruisers and we raced them through a stripmine and we each picked up a stripper then we drove the cars into the lake and the strippers drowned but it’s all good because they were also international drug dealers so the police gave us a medal and then we puked on the commissioner’s shoes, but he was totally cool about it and then he invited us upstairs and we got even more hammered on his private stash of Glenfiddich.”
But wait, what are they interested in me doing?
– Share your personal anthem on your blog
…I thought I was supposed to start off by doing that? What is up with you, Marketing Person? Do you expect me to tease this shit out? Like, on Monday i’ll be all “hey guys I’m going to have a total POWER ANTHEM post for you tomorrow” and then on Tuesday I go “sup guys, POWER ANTHEM is delayed until tomorrow, in the meantime here is a picture of Jughead eating a hamburger,” and then on Wednesday I drop the POWER ANTHEM post and it’s about how when I was in high school this one girl told me I’d never get laid because I was too weird,3 but that doesn’t matter because AXE products make me smell like a frathouse after it’s just been cleaned because everybody’s parents are visiting the next day.
* Encourage your readers to share their own anthems for a chance to win a Flip Camera from AXE. This way they can capture their next wild experience in real-time. Feel free to share the video link with them to better explain what an anthem is.
I am not sharing the video link with you. It’s about this guy who goes to a party and gets wasted, and then he goes to a motel and has kinky sex with a kinky girl, and then he has a shower with two hot chicks and then gets the crap kicked out of him, and in between he showers with AXE. If I showed you the video link, I am fairly sure I would be causing a spike in suicides.4
But besides that, they’re asking me to ask you to tell me about emofests or puke adventures. Who the hell does that? Do they even read this blog? We’re fucking nerds. Every story would have Stormtroopers in it.
* Get your readers talking and we’ll send you a basket of AXE shower gel line-up and 2 Flip Cameras – one for you and one for a lucky reader.
See, now I know one-third of you are totally going to be all “dammit MGK I wanted a Flip Camera,” but Flip Cameras are dogshit cameras for bad people, and I know that most of you are not bad people. But what really irks me is that AXE here is asking me not only to whore my blog out for a basket of shower gel I don’t like and a shitty-ass camera I won’t use, but they’re asking me to do it on contingency. Kia Motors was willing to fly me5 to motherfucking Korea in the hopes that I would say nice things about the Kia Driveycar but AXE isn’t willing to send me $500 worth of shitty phones and shitty shower gel unless I prove to them in advance that I will suck their marketing dick, and that I will do so to their satisfaction to boot.
Needless to say, I ignored the mail, because of all of the above and also because I thought passing Business Associations might be a good idea so that law school was not a complete waste of time. But then, a couple of days later, they sent me another email.
Just sending a quick follow up note to get your thoughts and feedback on the proposed blog post idea.
Dude. I hope you do not do online personal dating or anything like that, because when somebody ignores your initial post, it’s practically never because they missed it, no matter how many times you might tell yourself otherwise. It’s always for one simple reason: they are not that into you. Because you are in marketing for a career, this is probably even moreso the case. I was just going to be all “fuck it,” and just delete the email and move on, but then you had to bother me again. And this is what happens when you can’t let something go: you get mocked on a B-level nerdblog!
HOLY SHIT I DON’T BELIEVE THIS UPDATE: I was just checking my email as I am wont to do and Marketing Person emailed me again.
I just wanted to touch base one final time to see if there is any interest in this AXE sponsored story and FLIP camera giveaway.
This is after I just spent a thousand words or more trashing his marketing method, the product he’s trying to market, his idea for marketing that product, and Flip Cameras. I am just totally blown away, I really am. I mean, is he gonna keep going? Is this really the one final time he contacts me? Or next month is he going to suggest that I hold a “totally awesome” essay contest about how much you all love Crest toothpaste, and offer to send me a bucket of Crest plus two Razor phones, one for me and one for one of my readers?
Coming soon: viral Youtube campaign designed to get me an articling position and/or a gig at Marvel! Actually, possibly both at once. [↩]
And then, of course, there are the people who just want me to talk about Power Pack. [↩]
This did not in fact happen. I am making a point. [↩]
Or, alternately, you would band together to find the guy in the video and beat the shit out of him. [↩]
Hey, everybody. Long story short: the next two weeks for me are nothing but writing my tax policy paper, studying, writing exams, and then collapsing in a heap for a couple of days having – hopefully – graduated law school.1
So I’ll be back in two weeks. Hopefully my guestbloggers will chip in with some content so this is not a barren wasteland for the next little while. I might do a post or something if something catches my eye and I feel the need to blow off steam, but don’t expect regular updates for the next little while, is my point.
Incidentally, if you know anybody in the GTA – or, fuck it, Canada – who is a lawyer looking to hire an articling student, let me know? Or let them know? Let somebody know, is my point. [↩]
It’s been spamming me all goddamn day. I don’t want to visit it and get loaded down with whatever malware there might be. Does anybody know what the fuck is up with them?
So you may have noticed the immense amount of downtime on the site over the last day and change. Basically, what has happened is this: Google Reader Play got launched, and quite a few images from the Kim Jong-LOL post got added to it, and then a bunch more got added to it, and the end result is a shitload of image leeching that the server really wasn’t ready to handle in the way that it’s configured.
Rest assured that my crack team of people willing to do me favours for next to nothing is on the case, but there’s not going to be any new content for a bit until things are relatively stable once more.
Hello, everyone! Sorry to detract from the actual entertaining posts, but I wanted to introduce myself so that next week, everyone knows that it was the new guy and not MGK who said that whoever green-lit “Spider-Man: Reign” must have been smoking crack. (Note: This may not actually be the topic of next week’s post. I don’t believe in stating the obvious.)
My name is John Seavey, and I’m a writer who’s probably best known on the Internet for my series of “Storytelling Engines” columns on ‘Comics Should Be Good’ and my accidentally inflammatory “How To Save Marvel Comics” columns on my own blog, ‘Fraggmented’. Offline, I’m probably best known for my contributions to the ‘Feng Shui’ line of RPGs from Atlas Games…which still isn’t saying much, but hey, it beats being on ‘America’s Most Wanted’.
Somewhere in all that writing, I caught the attention of Mightygodking, who politely offered me the chance to be one of his regular guest bloggers. Speaking as someone who doesn’t get even a tenth of the audience this place pulls in, I jumped at the chance. I’m no dummy, after all. (This may, in fact, be your only point of concrete evidence on this point, and it’s really my word against yours.)
So what kind of posts can you expect from me in my Friday slot? Well, I can usually be relied upon to talk about comics, although you should be aware that I am something of a curmudgeon about the current state of the market (I have at one point suggested that DC should just publish a new crossover every year called, “DC Kills Everyone Who’s Alive and Resurrects Everyone Who’s Dead!”) I also do a good line in chatting about movies, and I can yammer about Doctor Who with the best of them. (I can actually follow a debate about “UNIT Dating”. And “Lives Before Hartnell”.) And sometimes, I just have crazy weird shit that I have to get out of my head, which is really the secret purpose of every blog everywhere. (This is why there are fewer homeless people now. They do their crazy ranting on blogs instead of street corners.)
It should also be noted that I have political opinions. If MGK’s offend you, you’re not going to be any happier with mine.
So that’s me, at least the parts of me that will relate to this blog. Assuming MGK doesn’t shitcan me for such a boring opening post, tune in next week to hear me saying something interesting!
(Warning: Use of the term “interesting” does not guarantee actual interesting content. If content is “Spider-Man: Reign” related, author reserves the right to do the joke about the “Spider-Man” cartoon theme. Author has been known to define “Friday posts” as occurring on Saturday, or even the following Tuesday. If you have serious liver problems, please contact your doctor before reading. If you have extremely serious liver problems, please contact your doctor right now. In case of fire, read this post while using the stairs, not the elevator.)
So I’m just going to put up the annual “Christmas drive” post right now, because the simple truth is this: keeping this site up and running costs me a fair chunk of change and a lot of work. I like doing the work and I don’t really mind paying the money: that is why there are no advertisements on this site (and never will be for anything other than things I am personally involved in creating).
But that doesn’t mean I mind occasionally holding out the hat; after all, I only do it three times per year (on Christmas, my birthday, and the site’s anniversary in August). Because while I would do it for free and indeed mostly do just that, I still like offsetting the cost a bit.
So this time I present you with not one but two options. The first option is the ever reliable Amazon.ca wishlist (Amazon.com shipping is too prohibitive, alas, to make giftgiving from it really worthwhile). The second and newer option is that I have finally caved and included a Paypal donation button on the sidebar there for people who might just want to tip a buck or two into the hat rather than buying me large impressive presents that show how amazing your genitalia are (and I am certain they are quite splendid).
(Hey, if every one of this site’s unique readers chipped in just one dollar a year, this could be my job! Except, on second thought, that is kind of disturbing on multiple levels.)
So people may have noticed that the site occasionally crashes for two to three minutes and then comes back up. This is only tangentially related to traffic issues: the problem is the result of the way my site’s folders are structured after I switched providers last year.
My friend Rob wrote a script to auto-reboot Apache whenever it crashes, but it can only work so fast. And I’m really tired of comments on other sites saying “site seems to be down whoops now it’s back.”
Anybody out there a WordPress genius who can fix it? I can pay you in jellybeans and rainbows.
Today marks the second anniversary of my really having started blogging on this new site in earnest after being booted off Livejournal. (Which probably only sped matters up somewhat as at the time I’d been planning to move to a more independent platform anyway, but still, my thanks to LJ for giving me primo outlaw rebel credibility!) Honestly, it’s been a great experience, even if my tendency to write somewhat melodramatic and foul-mouthed diatribes about, well, pretty much anything has probably hurt my employability over the long run. I enjoy writing stuff, and I’m glad that you folks enjoy reading it.1
That having been said, the simple truth is that in about a year’s time I’m going to be busier than ever once I start my articling job.23 So over the next year what I’m hoping to do is find some interested/interesting people who might want to write here as co-bloggers; I like that this site generally manages to deliver a pretty high and constant rate of content and I’d like to ensure that that still happens when I’m working 14-hour days, even if my personal contributions have to lessen in scale somewhat. Applicants should send me an email, preferably with something they can point to in the “hey I done this” sense.
So anyway I will conclude this post by passing the hat around, as it is nearly time to pay money again for the site being, like, up, and I don’t want to put advertisements on my shit.4
Even if I do question your taste occasionally. [↩]
Which is essentially a sort of paid legal apprenticeship. [↩]
And believe me: I get solicited for ads all the time. It is kind of crazy. It’s not even form letters any more; it’s people who actually bother to comment on something I’ve written before asking me to sell them webspace to advertise their penis pump or whatever. [↩]
As per usual: no “I should write” requests and no guarantees that I will write about anything you request. But if you look at my past track record, odds are usually about 1/3 or so that I’ll be interested in your suggested topic.
