WONG

Innocuous words that will return porn in Google Image Search.

Another treasure from the forums.

Hey, remember the fund raiser we had for St. Jude’s, where they would let you engrave a name of your choosing on a memorial brick and we engraved one that said “Brick Tamland?”

HERE.

Well, it’s time to do something like that again. If you’ve got ideas, suggest it in the forum thread.

Some people are terrified of message boards, and I don’t blame them. Just last night I was browsing through the enormous gaming forum NeoGaf and saw this 100-plus reply thread discussing my Video Game Commandments article. I quietly backed away without even a glance inside.

Nothing good can come from me joining that discussion, though no doubt it is simply dozens of people speculating as to whether I am a mere genius, or some kind of transcendent super-being representing the ultimate in human evolution. Mankind must find this answer on its own, I cannot reveal it to them.

Anyway, if you hate message boards because of the kind of anonymous, over-aggressive ass-hattery that goes on, you may wonder why any sane person participates at all. The reason is that occasionally, magic happens.

This is one of those occurrences.

A young man drops in, eager to show off his web comic, presumably the first one he has ever, ever made. If you then scroll down to the bottom of the first page, you’ll see other members being to post their own episodes, taking the man’s own art in strange and wonderful new directions, surely to his delight.

As some of you have noticed from my author page, when we turned off the PWoT server last week, not every article got saved.

I have 37 articles listed there, maybe 10 of them Cracked originals. Because I didn’t have the time or staff to import all 105 articles from PWoT (as they have to be laboriously reformatted by hand) I basically picked the top 15 or so most popular, which represented more than 99% of the traffic PWoT was getting. Then after that I just started working through the movie reviews at random.

Some day I’d like to have the entire library restored for posterity (and it would be for posterity only, I saw the traffic those things were getting) but it will have to be done on an article-by-article basis.

If there is an article that you particularly miss, comment below. If I get three votes to restore it, I’ll make time some weekend and upload it instead of riding my jet ski.

Page 16 appears to have been lifted from the book Hurling Cats Against The Wall.

About once a week somebody asks me to update The gamer’s manifesto, which got 1.6 million hits in its run but is now three years old and hopelessly out of date. I always hesitated to do that because it seemed kind of cheap to do a “sequel” the article where I wind up re-using a lot of it anyway (since so many of the items do still apply). I thought it would feel like a dance remix track of my one hit song.

What I decided to do was approach it from another angle and, after a quick survey of disgruntled gamers in the forum gathered the principles behind their many, many complaints and formed them into the Seven Commandments of Gaming:

The article.

Digg it.

Thanks to everybody who contributed, your money is in the mail.

New feature article coming tomorrow. Tune in at around 8 am EST.

As many, many of you have noticed, we have finally turned out the lights on  the pointlesswasteoftime.com server, after nine years.

In the early spring of 1999, I wrote a retarded movie review on a message board. It was deleted and some guy emailed saying he wanted to read it, and asked if I stored the stuff I wrote somewhere.  I didn’t, but I went and opened a free hosting account on a site called Freeservers and put the review up there so it could be a repository of all the things that got deleted from message boards by moderators who didn’t like lots and lots of penis jokes in their posts.

The PointlessWasteofTime.com domain was purchased in November of that year, after I read an article saying they were extending the allowed length of domain names and I thought it would be funny to come up with the longest name possible.

That thing I started on the spur of the moment would come to dominate the next third of my life. I put in an average of 30-40 hours a week updating the site and moderating the forums, for basically no reward other than the compliments of many strangers.
But,  following the belief that even a dog turd will grow into a tree if you water it enough, PWoT finally bore fruit and I wound up with a career writing dick jokes and horror novels. No English degree, no previous writing job, never had a single word published in a paper publication.  I wasn’t invited to the party, so I kind of wandered in and by the time they realized I didn’t belong, it was too late.  I had brought those cocktail wieners everybody likes and they figured they’d let me stay until they were gone. But I brought a lot of  wieners. A lot. And they’re in sauce.
Anyway, new article tomorrow.

So Cracked mainstay Mike Swaim, whose crew did the internet party video that approached 10,000 diggs and helped make Cracked famous (as well as the video game sketch linked below), have entered a YouTube competition called the Sketchies, where they take videos of sketch comedy and the winner gets like $50,000.

So Swaim and his crew (called Those Aren’t Muskets!) entered a video and wound up as one of the ten finalists among all the millions of videos that were entered. So that’s really cool.

But now they’re in the next round, and they need your vote.

The page is below, Youtube randomizes the videos so no one gets an advantage, but next to the video window you’ll see a link for “Next Video” and that will let you scroll through them. The TAM! video is a fake trailer for a movie called CHOPS!

Find it here.

So if you liked it and/or want to help out Swaim and Cracked (as we will almost certainly claim credit for any success he has from here on out) find his video on there and give it a vote.

Another way you can help is by Digging it and sending more traffic its way.

This way, once Swaim becomes famous he’ll owe all of us favors and we’ll be able to crash by his pool when we all move out to LA.

By the way, if you’re wondering what video they made was so awesome as to put them in the top ten among the whole universe of video submissions at YouTube in the first place, behold.

I have nothing to say in defense of this. It is The Scientology Song, and I am sorry.

The cat’s pretty much out of the bag. This was the “big news” I had been hinting at for months.

Read the announcement in Fangoria.

Don Coscarelli, the guy who did Bubba Ho Tep and the Phantasm series, has bought the film rights to my ridiculous horror novel John Dies at the End. He contacted me in November and it’s taken from then until now to get the paperwork together with the lawyers and all that.

Here’s an interview I did with Apex Digest where I mentioned it.

So there it is, kids. No matter how incredibly retarded your dream is, it can still come true. We’re all talking about it in the forums.