Winning the Internet, one comment at a time

An image from a once-wholesome, now-horrifying Wendy's commercial.

My latest Comment of the Week triumph!

I think I've been posting stuff to the Internet for about 20 years now. Yep. If I haven't had my two-decade online anniversary yet, then it's definitely creeping up on me. Of course, I haven't kept meticulous records of these things, but I became an official "Netizen" (I still hate that term) only a year or so after graduating high school, so that puts the date somewhere in the mid-1990s. Jeez Louise! That was two or three Presidents ago!

In the early days, I confined myself to text-only Usenet message boards. That wasn't by choice. That was simply all I could manage with a 2400 bps modem. Then I went through a whole America Online phrase, during which I went by the handle "DelVarmint." Yeah, I know. It was the '90s. That's what we did back then. People actually used to use the word "cyberspace" without irony in those days. Ah, memories.

Of course, the Internet is about fifty blajillion times better now than it was when I started traversing the virtual seas. If there's something I miss about those early days, it's that it was so much easier to get people's attention and find an audience back then. All you really had to do was post original content of -- no exaggeration -- any kind. It just had to be something that people hadn't seen elsewhere. That was the basic requirement.

I know this from first-hand experience, because one of my original successes was a script I wrote called The Rocky & Bullwinkle Horror Picture Show. I posted it to a few Rocky Horror message boards, and it became what we'd now call a "viral" hit of sorts. Nowadays, there are people posting professional-caliber content to sites like YouTube every hour of every day. A clunky, homemade creation like Bullwinkle Horror (which was just a script and had no accompanying video or pictures) would have zero chance of becoming an online success in 2014.

But have I given up? I have not. I'm both an attention whore and a recluse, so the internet is pretty much the perfect venue for me. And I have a whole bunch of ideas and opinions that I desperately want to share with the public, if only so the rest of the world will acknowledge that I exist. It's my way of saying, "I WAS HERE, GODDAMNIT!" How do I do that? Well, I still have this blog, naturally, and I use every form of social media I can find to promote it. (Here's a shout out to literally everyone on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google Plus, and Bloglovin!)

And when the mountain won't come to Muhammad, then Muhammad is going to bloody well schlep his ass to that mountain. In other words, if my site isn't generating enough traffic (and it usually isn't), I'll go to places which already have established readership bases and see if I can't stir up some shit there instead. Like this:

• Here's my latest article for the AV Club. I think it's funny. Or funny enough. Go read it. Please?

• Once again, I've won the coveted Comment of the Week at Josh Fruhlinger's Comics Curmudgeon Blog. Now, that might not mean a heck of a lot to you, but (to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson): "In some circles, the Comment of the Week is a far, far better thing than the Super Bowl, the Kentucky Derby, and the Lower Oakland Roller Derby Finals all rolled into one."