Well, we’re back. With the gap in posting, we got hit with a lot of questions from our dedicated readers. While our answers were dodgy, we were working through some shit. Rather than addressing everything individually, here we go with another post answering your fucking questions!
Wha’ Happen?
Shit, everyone’s leaving? If I was managing something and everyone left, my ass would be fired.
Yeah, shit was bananas. With Christina going back to the culinary world (and really, taking more than her share of abuse from people), and Mike becoming disinterested we were suddenly faced with dealing with a major shit storm. With two of the writers leaving, we also lost our beta readers, our editor, and our website admin. It all just sort of happened at once, and because we weren’t making any money (read: we weren’t paying anyone), it was very hard to convince them to stay, when we really lost the vision for the website.
At first, we wanted to be unapologetically honest about what we perceived in business, and that intrigued many. As we started getting hate from Agile fanboys, or the trolls who just want to shit on someone for suggesting we treat people with respect, our vision suddenly changed to “fuck them, what can we do to further provoke them.” It happened pretty damn quick too.
Long story short, we lost the plot, those around us felt that and left.
Where did everyone go?
Well, Christina went back to being a chef, and moved back to France, since really, that’s where her heart has been since originally living there. She’s happy, so we’re happy.
Mike is still a PO. Even though he was kicked out of the church where he was a pastor, he still takes part in a ministry that he’s created, although, because of his potty mouth, his left-leaning politics, and his belief in things like love your neighbor as yourself, when you pray do so in private, and what you do for the least of you, you do unto me (and other Christianly shit) he’s received a lot of push back from local church groups. That, paired with his regular day job has led him to step away from posting here, and we support that shit.
Kevin/Keith/Whatever the fuck his name is… the editor, James the website admin, and Joel and Tove our beta readers all went back to their day jobs. We still keep in contact through a gaming Discord server.
The Ever-Elusive Process
What happened to the memes? They made reading about a boring topic enjoyable.
Did you know that those dumb ass fucking memes you find on Reddit are technically protected by copywrite? Not technically, they are. While we are within our right to use it under fair use, proving that we are covered by that requires a legal challenge, and lawyers are not cheap.
All your articles have the same anti-business tone to it…
Firstly, we’re not anti-business, we’re anti-bullshit.
… and it comes across as being written by people all sharing the same brain cell…
We’ve gotten this a few times, and specifically referencing the tone of our articles, and how it can sometimes sound like it’s all being spewed forth from one dedicated manifesto. When we first started (pre-website) we were running an email campaign. The one bit of feedback we got was that the tone of each article was so different that it sounded like they were contradicting each other, even when the articles agreed.
We met someone who worked for a major news outlet, and he explained that these media organizations employ someone whose entire job it is to make sure that the tone of the article aligns with the tone that the outlet is trying to convey.
He explained that at his job, this role was to ensure that all personality was stripped from the articles, so that they read as factually based as possible, since people are more likely to trust the validity of something if it sounds clinical (or some shit like that).
That’s where Josh came in. He would take the articles written by the other contributors, and then zhuzh the up so that they had the same tone and aligned with our mission.
… did you ever think about bringing in someone who disagreed with you to be a contributor?
We did, and in fact we had someone, Jarrod, who insisted that we use his nom de plume Buck Hunterton (I wish I was kidding). Jarrod had never written for any site prior, and wanted to join to act as a counter point to our “commie rantings” (seriously, I wish I were kidding).
We decided to give him a shot because, honestly, he was a great writer, and had a way with words (damn near poetic). We had one request, that at minimum, attempt to leave as much politics out of the writing as possible. If he was to provide a counterpoint, we wanted it to be rooted in legitimate arguments, not the “you’re commies” argument that kicked off the initial interaction.
What happened was a progression that saw the article come down as “liberals want to turn this country into a third-world country, where everyone sucks at Uncle Sam’s teat” to eventually being a personal attack on the rest of the contributors. This was all done as a way of explaining that business is good and always right.
We’ve always tried to keep politics out of the site; mostly focusing on “you see this shit? Fuck that shit!” So, it was a shock that the first writer we were going to bring in that would write a contrary point couldn’t separate his politics from analyzing business.
We had plans to eventually find someone else to write that could offer a counterpoint, but as of today, we have yet to find anyone.
You seem to embrace the controversy but get angry when you get pushback.
It’s not necessarily about being angry about the pushback, it’s being angry about people saying kill yourself, or attacking us, rather than the argument.
It’s also not necessarily that we embrace controversy, we’re actually pretty averse to it. For example, we sent Josh’s review of FFVII back and told him to soften that shit, because FFVII fans are absolutely fucking terrifying. We also told him to be significantly more critical of FFVIII because FF fans can be absolutely fucking terrifying.
We pride ourselves in being unapologetically honest, but at the same time, understand that saying things that are too controversial is going to bring the wrong kind of attention. It’s more about walking a fine line between honesty and reality.
What’s next for you?
Well, it saddens us to say, but we’re probably shutting the site down in August or September.
Originally, we were hoping that we could monetize the site in some way prior to the 3-year renewal. While we had a few opportunities for a partnership, in each case it would require us to plug the service in every article, and even then, we’d only get paid when someone signs up for this service.
We didn’t want to do this, because it would risk our artistic integrity or some shit, I don’t know.
Our readership has been in slow decline since the drama last year. Interestingly, by including articles about gaming, we’ve seen growth in unique visitors, but no where near the number we’d need to replace the readers we lost by going up against big Agile.
So, in a team meeting, someone asked “is it even worth it? The service is expensive, and registering the domain is also very costly.” Sadly, no one had an answer. We just sort of sat there, staring blankly around the room.
We haven’t committed to shutting down as of yet, but as of right now, we’re heavily leaning that way.
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