Cracked.com has debuted Quick Fix, a daily deal featuring very short articles which can be read and enjoyed in under a minute. Unless, of course, you are an incredibly slow reader. I am one of three writers there chosen to be the Opening Day guinea pigs, and this here is my contribution. Some knucklehead wrote a whole book about a Three Stooges episode, and deserves a comically over-sized mallet to the head for his troubles.
Yep, same guy. That and nine more artists who did a complete from 180 from what gave them their start, available for an unlimited time only on TopTenz. Credit: me. Me me me.
Fair warning: this is a long and pissed-off post.
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So the PrankDial gig I wrote about and lined to a couple days ago? One and done.
The job’s hourly rate, as advertised on eLance, was $15-20/hr for 9-10 hours of work. That’s basically $150-$200 a week and, when adjusted for a flat per-article rate, came to $75-100 a post. For a regular twice-weekly gig, that was just beyond awesome.
The guy who hired me said my writing was awesome, perfect for them, and they wanted to give me full creative control to work my magic and all that good stuff. Great! So, naturally, it was all bullshit. I accepted and the guy immediately began to retract his promises, offering a mere $50 a week. Disappointing for sure, but I let it slide. I’m trying to turn writing/editing into a full-blown career, but I’m not a greedy money-monger either.
What truly spun my anger wheel was how he made it clear, without outright saying it, that “creative control” was a bald-faced lie. First, he told me to keep the posts short, as the readers “don’t have very long attention spans.” Fine by me; I was planning to keep them short anyway. That’s what blogs are for (except for today’s, apparently). Then he kept giving me examples from other sites as to what he was “looking for”. He told me the readers love dorky stuff like games and music and movies.
OK, great. Always good to know what people like to read about.
Yet whenever I pitched anything close to those categories, the owner shot me down for frustratingly vague reasons. Many of my ideas, even before writing, were killed for not being “what the readers want” or “too specific”. Well, don’t link me to all these articles, including a CollegeHumor article piece making fun of Google Goggles if you don’t me to be specific and topical, douchenuts.
So finally I submitted a post: http://blog.prankdial.com/post/21207160255/3-ways-to-play-older-games-after-used-games-are-banned. You can’t read it now, as they’ve deleted all the text. But it seemed to get a good enough reaction from people who read it. The site owner, though, HATED it. Didn’t find it funny at all. Really, guy? This isn’t my first gig ever, y’know. Been doing this for close to ten years in one form or another. Pretty sure I’m funny, unless you’re just one of those people who sees words and runs in the opposite direction cuz readin’s 4 loozrs.
Finally, he tells me to check out the site’s Facebook page for inspiration as to what drives traffic among the readers. So I do, and what do I find? Nothing but found pictures. This guy’s version of “funny” is nothing more than typing “Funny Pictures” into Google Image Search and posting them with MAYBE one line of text. So readin’s IZ 4 loozrs, as it turns out.
So I quit. One post, bye-bye. Homey don’t play bullshit games. You just want a guy to find other people’s pictures? Advertise it that way. I am NOT here to be lied to.
I suppose I should’ve known better since the site’s main deal is scripting fucking crank phone calls. I stayed optimistic though, going under the assumption that their blog was going to be something different, and they wanted me to make it different. Nope; they just wanted more unoriginal bullshit, despite one of his original conditions being that my stuff be…ORIGINAL. Yep, that bug-on-your-monitor GIF everyone’s seen for years sure is original and witty.
Oh, by the way, here’s the site’s full blog: http://blog.prankdial.com. This is what they find worthy of their time. As you can see, my post is gone, though the comments are not. The first was just a guy named Ryan calling it hilarious, which is always good to see. The other, submitted by somebody called “Thereaders”, actually bothered to write “I don’t think this is what us readers are looking for.” I’m not a betting man, but I’d be willing to wager quite a bit of money that “Thereaders” is actually the idiot who runs that site. I’d also be willing to wager that a lot more people at least chuckled at the post than said owner is willing to admit.
Started a new twice-weekly blogging gig for PrankDial.com, a website all about prank calls and practical jokes. I know very little about pranks, save for that one time I stuck an old, broken laptop in a PS3 display case and tricked my brother into thinking I had gotten him a PS3 for Christmas. Lucky for me, I was hired to write about basically anything dorky. So I did. Video games and crappy Photoshops all around today!
Link in the title, as per usual. No picture preview, because there’s only three, I made them all, and want you to read and be surprised.
New from me! Huzzah! I consider this my first PSA: WARNING: EVEN IF YOU THINK YOU WON THE LOTTERY, THERE’S A GOOD CHANCE REAL LIFE WILL BEG TO DIFFER. DO NOT QUIT YOUR CRAPPY LOW-PAYING JOB, YOU WILL STILL NEED TO SUFFER THERE TOMORROW. THIS IS A WARNING.
A new series of sentences from moi. The above picture represented the Detroit Tigers in the late-20s. And they haven’t stopped being an utter joke since.
And, we are officially caught up! Hot diggity! This was written for TopTenz yesterday, featuring ten film premises that Lorne Michaels would be wise to pay me to write up completely. Yes, some of these characters are old but Hell, they made a Coneheads movie twenty years after that sketch went away. There is literally no reason to not green-light everything I have proposed.
Original Publishing Date: February 29, 2012
Written for TopTenz. Note to Sean Combs: you are on this list twice. Your hero, Biggie, isn’t on even once. Get the point, Mr. Inferior?
Original Publishing Date: February 2, 2012
Written for TopTenz. Just because it’s a damned video game series doesn’t mean it can’t make a lick of sense. Continuity is hard.
Original Publishing Date: January 25, 2012
Written for Gunaxin in time for the annual Royal Rumble. And already outdated, as this year’s Rumble finish (Sheamus vs Chris Jericho) ended up being beyond awesome, and probably would get bumped up to #3 or #4 on the Best list if I felt like updating the article. Which I sure as shit don’t.
Original Publishing Date: January 25, 2012
Written for Gunaxin. Yes, there IS a Democrat running for President besides Obama! A psychotic, intensely pro-life, anti-gay, ridiculously conservative Democrat, but still a Democrat! His goal was to air a commercial featuring aborted fetuses during the Super Bowl, which ended up not happening. He had ONE campaign promise and he broke it. The perfect politician!
Original Publishing Date: January 9, 2012
Written for Gunaxin as an attempt at writing more quickie, topical pieces at a faster pace. I’ve since put it on hold due to a similar thing being concocted at Cracked, but the focus there seems to be changing to the point where I can probably start doing these things again. Commence wetting yourself in anticipation.
How long has it been since I updated this thing? Too fuck long. Same with my twitter, really. I’m an awful social networking guy-type-thing. But I’ve actually been writing, serious! I keep forgetting to link the damned things, which is awful when the thing I write is topical. Time to correct that in one fell swoop, like one of those mob movies where everybody gets whacked in one two-minute montage.
Newest from me, all about quotes and jokes and songs and such wrongly credited to the wrong people. On a related note, if anybody tries to forward this to their friends by saying LOL MADDOX ROTE DIS HES SO FUNNY N ITS SO TRU…I’ll cutcha.
Newest from TopTenz, and obviously written by me because I’m a filthy selfish man-whore who only pimps his own stuff. I like that about me.
And let me know if you actually like Jada Smith doing Limp Bizkit music, so that I may smack you.
