Archive for April, 2008
The Seven Commandments of Gaming
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008About 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me to update The gamer’s manifesto, which got 1.6 million hits in its run but is now three years old and hopelessly out of date.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:
Thanks to everybody who contributed, your money is in the mail.
The circle is complete
Monday, April 28th, 2008New 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.
Latching onto other people’s fame
Friday, April 11th, 2008So 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!
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.