Notes on my incredibly glamorous and exciting life (including a trip to Onion HQ)

No, this isn't an outtake from Caligula. It's supposedly a picture of an Onion staff party. (Not pictured: me.)

"May you be happy in the life you have chosen."

-Scrooge's ex-girlfriend, Belle*

*She doesn't really mean it when she says it, but I think it's good advice anyway.

My life is, at least partially by design, uneventful to the point of almost total stasis. I can define myself by the (many) things I dislike: people, crowds, noise, disruption, spending money, following directions, traveling, making small talk, listening, trying to be nice, doing favors for people, and social interactions of all kinds. The extent to which I can successfully and temporarily avoid these terrible maladies is the extent to which my life is tolerable. Of course, this comes at a price. Boredom, alienation, loneliness, and stagnation are the occasional side effects of my chosen lifestyle, but they beat the alternatives: despair, frustration, humiliation, resentment, and an overall disgust with the world and every last person in it. In other words, a relatively solitary, quiet, and dull life is the only kind for me. I couldn't imagine any other way of existing.

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."

Brief updates about my exciting, eventful life

Title card from new new video which lampoons AMC's Mad Men.

Happy Friday, one and all!

Josh Fruhlinger's blog, The Comics Curmudgeon

Just wanted to give my readers (all both of you) an update on some recent happenings involving your humble blogger. First, I landed another article in the Onion AV Club. This one was a change of pace since it was based on an assigned topic from an editor rather than one I pitched myself. But, still, I hope it turned out well. It's about a fake trailer which reimagines the popular cable drama Mad Men as a 1970s blaxploitation film. Please do go read it and watch the video while you're at it, too. The fake trailer, which was apparently made by a real-life advertising firm, is exceptionally well-produced and is fun whether or not you're a Mad Men junkie. Secondly, and now we're entering truly arcane territory, I was thrilled to have one of my smart-alecky remarks named the Comment of the Week at Josh Frulinger's venerable blog, The Comics Curmudgeon. Josh writes with incredible wit and insight about newspaper comics, and his blog has attracted a large and loyal fan base who come up with some very funny observations of their own. This little victory was especially sweet because my comment was about one of the soap strips, Apartment 3-G, which are always much, much funnier than the comic strips which are intentionally comedic. Anyway, these two little things made my day. Unless something awful happens in the next six hours, I'm going to declare today a success.

Here's my check from the Onion

Almost too cool to cash: a $45 check from The Onion.

I'm still debating whether or not to cash this: it's a $45 check from The Onion, and just as I had hoped, it has the slogan "America's Finest News Source" written on it. To me, this is a really cool little pop culture collectible. I also haven't decided whether I'm going to try to pitch any further stories to them. It was something I had wanted to do for a while. Now, I've done it, and I kind of want to leave it at that, like I just crossed off another item on my personal bucket list. I actually don't have a pop culture bucket list (and I didn't even see the movie), but that would have been on there. Maybe I can try to win the New Yorker caption contest or something. I was a finalist once and then kind of gave up on it. The late Roger Ebert stuck with the contest and, after many attempts, finally won. Maybe I should follow his example. I don't know.

I somehow sold a story to the Onion A.V. Club

See the picture in the lower right hand corner? That's my story!

Quick update: I managed to sell a story to my favorite entertainment website, The A.V. Club, aka the pop-culture-reviewing spinoff of the satirical newspaper The Onion. It's a goofy little item about child actor Mason Reese. While I realize this is a modest accomplishment indeed, I'm completely psyched about being in the AVC, a site which has been a heavy influence on this blog. Here's a link to the article. I hope you will enjoy it. This was so much fun to write, and I hope I get the chance to write more for them in the future.