An Update on Your Intrepid Writer in This, The Year of Our Orange Buttlord
Hello, Medium! It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? Let’s bring everyone up to speed.
When we last spoke through an intricate series of dick jokes, I was fully ready to throw in the towel on my commentating days. I’m talking ghosting forever and vanishing into the ether like the gilded blog that I used to cram full of celebrity boobs and socio-political commentary as if that combination made a goddamn lick of sense.
But I didn’t. I powered through, and it turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. Shortly after publishing the wrap-up I almost entirely bailed on, Dustin Rowles generously reached out to offer me a spot at Pajiba, and I’ve been blogging away ever since. The folks there are just so fucking amazing and unbelievably welcoming of my awkward ass that’s been working alone for an unhealthy amount of time. Every day, I’m humbled that my weirdo words somehow have a home on their incredible site, and that they continue to put up with me while I get my groove back.
On that note, there are 60+ posts waiting for your greedy little eyes right here:
Also, to clear up some confusion, Pajiba is not a new site that I started. It’s been around for a while, and Dustin is even more of an old school blogger than I am. Which is why you should abandon requests that I’m going to start populating Pajiba with Instagram models and/or celebrity buttholes. Those days are over, and frankly, I don’t miss slinging cartoon breasts for clicks.
But for old time’s sake, here you go.
Okay, maybe I do miss this. Someone find Photo Boy. WE NEED TO GO BACK.
*slaps self in the face*
I’m good. I’m good. I’m in a happy place…
But since we’re reminiscing about The Superficial, longtime reader Joseph peppered me with a barrage of questions over the Thanksgiving holiday. So I hope he doesn’t mind if I answer them here. It’ll be fun or horribly depressing. I like those odds.
- Is there a reason you didn’t/haven’t started your own site since leaving The Superficial?
Well, Joseph, when I wrote my retrospective on the final days of the site, I described the state of digital media as such: “Basically, the internet pooped out its butt, and no one knows if it’s going back in.” But I’ll let you in on a little secret.
I was being way too generous.
As evidenced by the collapse of Mic this week, the internet is so far prolapsed that it’s out the door, down the street, and strangling everything in its path. Starting my own site would have been an even faster ticket to the poorhouse than the one I’m on now. That said, I have heavily poked around with the prospect of crowdfunding, and that’s not entirely off of the table yet.
Although, it is eyeing a swan dive onto the linoleum.
2. Does the super sharp wit in your writing come out just as quickly when you’re speaking to people?
Not even once.
I used to be a witty bastard in person — in the Before Time… — but that was quickly eroded away by spending 11+ years in a basement office and having most of my spoken conversations involve trying to corral young children into putting some goddamn clothes on and/or going to bed.
At this stage, it’s a miracle I can still speak English.
3. How did you find out the pop culture info and content you produced on The Superficial? The news always seemed extremely fresh on The Superficial often before I saw it elsewhere on the Internet.
First part, RSS. It’s that easy. Second part, I can assure you it was not extremely fresh because my entire schtick was aggregating TMZ, Us Weekly, People, you name it. And that content became even less fresh with the advent of Twitter where you could easily get hot takes without getting stabbed in the eye with malware for a free iPhone that you definitely did not win.
4. Have you considered writing for television? You would write the most incredible dialogue, think Joss Whedon circa Buffy the Vampire Slayer work.
Without humblebragging, I have had Hollywood talks, and those still pop up from time to time. All I can say is those conversations are always very nebulous and with very little guarantee of income, which I had locked down at The Superficial.
That said, freelancing is not exactly gainful employment, so if production studios would like another sniff at my butt, I’ll be out front wearing nothing but a towel. (No cops.)
5. Could you characterize for someone in a completely different profession what the process of producing The Superficial content was like? I’m extremely curious. Did you have to go through proofreaders, laywers, etc. before you could post things? The impact you had was so great, one assumes an army was behind you, worried about every word.
Hahaha, oh man. Yeah, none of that happened.
Here’s how things went down: Either Photo Boy or I saw something that we could make a stupid joke about it — or embed way too many recordings of Stephen Hawking frequenting sex workers into— and then we did exactly that. That’s all she wrote.
Granted, there’d be consideration towards things we know would click well, but for the most part, it was entirely us just trying to jam our viewpoints into whatever celebrity nonsense was happening that day.
No one vetted it (much), and we were the proofreaders. Which is why almost every post was a minefield of typos. A toddler on coke could write better.
6. Are you OK now with The Superficial behind you? Are you writing full-time? Are you happy?
Without getting too depressing, I don’t know if I’ll ever be okay with what happened to The Superficial. It was such a huge part of my life, and if I’m being honest, it was a sizable chunk of my identity. Watching it get put down fucked me all the way up.
However, I am finding happiness in slowly evolving as a writer. Even though it’s a recent development and not a full-time gig, writing for Pajiba has been incredibly renewing. I’m extremely thankful for it, and it’s giving me a lot of confidence that I lost. Not just from The Superficial getting ground into dust, but from how I completely shrank from all of the things I swore I would write when that day finally came. I fucking folded.
But I also didn’t give myself time to recharge from how much I poured everything I goddamn had into that site. I just dove right into freelance work three days after we quit. I don’t like to boast about myself because I’ve seen dudes flame out in this business who got way too high on their own supply, but I genuinely lived, ate, and breathed The Superficial. And for a long time, I felt like I died with it.
That feeling is lifting though, and for once, I’m excited about the future. I’m taking some chances. I’m eyeing things up. So, yeah, you can say I’m happy.
Plus I find notes like this waiting on my desk. How can I lose?
Mike Redmond is the former writer/editor of The Superficial. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and kids who think he’s just some weirdo with a computer. They’re not wrong. (Twitter | Email)
