What the Cleaning of the Old Manuals Produced

As part of my therapy for hoardism, I assigned myself the cleaning of the old documentation. Normally, the cleaning of the old documentation would be a tedious and fruitless exercise. However, I stumbled upon a little treasure of years gone by. In 1990, Monty Python licensed a video game ( that you can downloaded here). This game was a side-scrolling good time in which you play DP Gumby as you try to find parts of your brain whilst shooting fish from your hand toward your enemies.

Apparently I'm so much of a hoarding bastard, I kept the little game's little manual and crammed it in a time capsule, set for the 2010 post-apocalyptic landscape. When it appeared it begged me to scan it so the rest of the world could also waste several hours reading random, meaningless drivel that will become the next inside joke at hipster parties.

Download a PDF of this file: monty_python_user_manual.pdf

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Dear FTC:

I appreciate the time you've taken to visit my blog. Please feel welcome to look around. I've been waiting for you guys to finally notice my blog, or really anybody for that matter. My daily site visits average between 25 and -19. It feels so good to finally have some bigwig from the government visit my site. It's like a breath of freshness since I can't even get my own mother to open the site.

So I've read a little about you guys and your new rules for bloggers. I've tried my best to always blog in accordance to my own ambiguous set of ethics. This includes having mealy-mouthed opinions, no comments, and content that would put tweaked meth freaks asleep.

Please notice I have no advertising on this site. I tried adwords a while back and discovered it was embarrassing to only run ads for lonely geek loser dating sites next to every, single, flipping article, regardless of the topic. My attempts to solicit more lucrative ads directly from one advertiser only resulted in my kidnapping by Nigerians. I think I misunderstood their whole currency exchange program. That kind of banking is really complicated and guns make me uncomfortable. And don't get me started on the Russians.

From what I understand, you want some kind of disclosure. In the past I have been given music, books, and software to review. The total value of these is around $3500 since my blog first appeared in 2004. Unfortunately, my blog hosting, all other software, and both server and home hardware I use to keep my dream alive has cost me $714,398.47. Hopefully you can get me some other readers so I can start monetizing this thing. My goal is to have enough of a readership by 2035 to get a sponsorship that isn't blocked by parental software. Tell all your agent friends.

I am a little concerned about your rule that opinions can't change. How can I keep up with public sentiment if you expect me to have strong, unmovable opinions? Our country was founded on a great tradition of journalistic wishy-washiness. Now I'm just a blogger without the moral integrity of Keith Olberman or Sean Hannity, but I will say that I fully plan on having strong opinions on various topics until such time those opinions are challenged by somebody else and I relent. Is that okay? If you want me to change that policy just spell it out. I have no problems doing whatever you guys say. Really. Seriously. Do you have ghost writers available? That would really help.

One final request: can you guys at the FTC "leak" to the news something about investigating my site? It would really give my site that extra publicity it needs to make it out of this trailer park. I'm ready to be interviewed by local news where I can go on an anti-government tirade for at least three minutes without breathing. I'll even lay my Arkansas accent on really thick so people will immediately sympathize with the FTC. It's win-win.

I feel honored the FTC is so interested in my little blog.  Please feel free to let me know how I can serve you and the interests of the federal government without regard for any of my remaining freedoms.

Sincerely,

Citizen #70145778352813322904

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Over at Snipe.net, Alison Gianotto (a.k.a. @snipeyhead ) thinks she's all that and a bag of chips on the shoulder. She went a long rant about bloggers giving advice about blogging. Clearly Alison has some kind of bone to pick with douchebaggers everywhere. She might as well have dropped an anvil on my head personally. Now I realize her article is a few weeks old, but she apparently is asking to be taken to blogging school.

I will not enjoy this, but somebody has to manage the woodshed.

Metameta

First and foremost, blogging is all about the meta. Bloggers must talk about blogging. How else would anybody else know how to blog? Let's say, for example, James Joyce didn't deliver the goods in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man? Would anyone know the depths of self loathing and misery novelists must endure before crapping out their own works of metafiction? I think not.

Metablogging is where the real modern writers are. They are the success stories. Like Tony Robbins is to real world business,  the metabloggers of our time are here to inspire wannabes everywhere to write about writing. If you cannot blog about blogging then you can't report about reporting or sing about singing. It's all the same really. Writers who don't blog about blogging are lost and don't deserve the revered title of "blogger". There are only a few blogs out there and they must count for something.

Marketing Is the Cornerstone of Civilization

The next thing Alison rants about in her "article" is some nonsense about marketing people needing to get a clue. In today's society, marketing is what holds us all together. Obviously she doesn't appreciate the way commercialism and marketing have rooted themselves into our culture to such a point people wear tattoos of logos of their favorite companies. She must have something against scripted phone calls during dinner time. What kind of communist would post such drivel? The next thing you know, she'll want the Pentagon to hand Wall Street's keys over to the Kaiser. Makes me want to puke.

Blogging Is the New Blogging

Finally, I say all bloggers out there must blog about blogging. Nobody cares about your cats or your kids or your stupid charities. Book reviews? What a joke. Nobody reads anymore; ask Steve Jobs. No one asked for regular people to become journalists and write stories that lazy, stupid reporters can't copy and paste from press releases. Bloggers who blog about blogging write those damn press releases for a reason. It's just the way things are. We didn't start the fire. It was always burning since the world's been turning.

I hope this clears things up. Coming soon, my listicle on blogging about bloggers who blog from a blogging conference. I'm thinking a good 75 tips should do it.

Alison's Real Spelling

Update: Apologies (in all seriousness) to Alison for originally misspelling her name. I went with the spelling in this graphic from her website and without my glasses, the letters blurred together. Where oh where did my 20/20 go? Pretty soon I'll be one of those people who use their 24" monitors to display 640 x 480 and view it through a magnifying glass.

And no, the irony is not lost on me.

I swear to the best of my memory this is the conversation I had with CapitalOne this morning:

Phone: [Unknown Name, Unknown Number] Ring, Ring

Me (oblivious to caller-ID): Hello

Capital One Rep: [Silence and Clicking]

Me (stupidly): Hello?

Capital One Rep: [More clicking then the sounds of a sweat farm call center in the background] Yes, may I speak with Julie please?

Me: Who is this?

CapitalOne Rep: This is [name removed since I can't remember it] from Capital One.

Me: What is this regarding?

CapitalOne Rep: This is Capital One, I would l like to speak with Julie because I have informary for her.

Me: Infomary?

CapitalOne Rep [now with apparent disgust]: I said information!

Me: Information? Like sales information?

CapitalOne Rep: This is not a sales call.

Me: But you're calling us. It must be a sales call.

CapitalOne Rep: This. Is. Not. A. Sales. Call.

Me. Well, go ahead and remove us from your sales list.

Capital One Rep [taking her balls and going home]: Fine! But she will not get anymore information from us!

Phone: [Click]

Dear CapitalOne "Bank":

My wife was actually available to take a call from you this morning. As it turns out both of us are very interested in any infomary or information you have regarding our accounts. However, it is confusing to us as to what "information" we would need as you have an extensive website we can access for account balances and the latest interest rates you have shoved up our asses. I can only assume the "information" you were calling us about was of such a secret nature and so important  you can't risk making it available on said website.

As to the nature of the information, I would like very much for you to go ahead and send us the off-shore account number via registered mail as I don't trust the phone system these days. We need the account number, the amount you're putting in millions, and the safe word or whatever you guys are calling it these days.

On the other hand, if the "information" you were trying to get to my wife this morning wasn't about the millions you want to deposit in our off-shore land of milk and honey, I can only assume it was a sales call.

Certainly with all of the latest banking shenanigans going on, you wouldn't use the English language as a way to trick somebody into hearing a sales pitch would you? Flat out denying it's a sales call and using "passing along information" left me feeling very duck-flies-at-midnight.  So I heavily recommend you train your sales people to be straightforward when calling or give up this stupid telemarketing shit already. You've already got our 30% interest and deed to our first born. What else could you want from us?

Sincerely,

MK Anderson

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It warms my cold, dry, wrinkled heart to know I have left a legacy people can actually use. That's right, my blog. I may not have a fancy book deal. I may spew meaningless parables to my children in hopes they one day make enough money to place me in one of those nicer homes they can feel good about when ignoring me. I may even show up at local networking events hoping to corner hapless victims into my pseudo-political theological philosophical mouth frothing. But at least I'm one of the few people in the world with a blog. That makes me a journalist. And with great power comes great something or other.

As Jolie O'Dell apparently witnessed firsthand at SxSW (See Why SXSW Sucks),  people read my advice and completely ran with it: Listicle: How To Fit In at Big Meetups. Not only am I proud to have inspired so many douches, I am proud to have not been there. I feel like Kim Jong Il after he fires a few missiles, threatens whole world,  and then hides in his palace to watch musicals.

According to Jolie's account at SxSW, she witnessed firsthand the power of my bulleted lists:

And non-technical people aren’t here to learn; they’re here for self-congratulation and mutual masturbation. People I’ve never heard of are referring to themselves as Twitter celebrities and generally making me ill. The real “celebrities” are dodging and evading these shallow douchebags, showing up at and slipping away from one official party after another to convene in a more refined, unofficial setting – only to find swarms of douchebags showing up an hour or so after the location is made known.

This is what it's all about, people. I mean people is what it's all about. Getting together and sharing their worst, showing off the dickery that has become modern culture. Historically, armies would charge through towns and lay them to waste, use up their resources, and leave nothing behind but carcasses and feces. Isn't it comforting to know we can still do it?

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Photo Courtesy of Fred Beecher at SXSW

So you thought you graduated high school went on to college and live in the real world. Unfortunately high school actually was preparation for the real world. Adults are nothing more than grown-up versions of everyone you hated back then. It used to be it hidden by social norms. At least ten or twenty years ago people pretended to be what we all thought adults should be. But thanks to social media, big events, perpetual networking, and the complete disregard for manners, pretending to be an adult is so last century.

I've prepared a listicle for those of you who only read blog articles if they contain lists that you can eat and poop like Chicken McNuggets. In this list I will tell you everything you need to know about fitting in so the next time you go to a big meetup with a bazillion other people.

1. You're a celebrity; act like it. You have a blog? You have a few hundred followers on Twitter? Well hell, you are a celebrity. Make sure you drop your @twittername when making reservations at the hotel. Being an Internet celeb has perks, dammit. You let everybody know it too. You deserve your free drinks and unlimited finger food.
2. Dominate every conversation. So we've established you're a celebrity but you have to work on your conversation skills. Obviously people wouldn't be talking to you if they didn't want to hear everything. Why deny them that privilege? If you are practiced in the art of conversation, you can take any topic and make it about you. Just deftly relate the topic to something you thought of in the shower. It works every time.
3. Act your age. All of us are arrested in some phase of our lives. Find your real age. No, not that sappy Oprah crap age based on how much grease is creeping its way to your heart. I mean your real age. That age where time stopped because Lizzie dumped you right after you were kicked off the football team for pissing on the bleachers during half time. Yeah, that age. You embody that age before you go to any karaoke bars.
4. Tweet while other people are talking. Why listen to somebody else's claptrap? If you have to relent to somebody else driving the coversation for a few seconds, make sure you take a picture with your phone and tweet about it. Make it clear only you can keep your attention. Include their @twittername in the tweet just in case they are as famous as you. If the other person is annoying you, then openly mock them.
5. Make sure you're an esoteric bandwagon snob. Beer, music, sports, it doesn't matter. Make sure you are on board with the latest meme, but also you think most people into it are morons. Only you know that hops from the Brazilian rain forests of Quebec make the best pilsner lager coffee porter. When it comes to music, all you need to is to drop this band name periodically: The Stone Roses. I don't know why, but it works every time.
6. Remove your wedding ring. At meetups, you have to make absolutely sure you come off as single and 20-something. This is really hard to do if you keep bringing up your wife and kids. Just don't. Nobody in Silicon Valley has kids, the government saw to that. You cannot come off as genuine if you talk about some Oompa-Loompas who only exist to drain your soul and prevent you from attending every other meetup.
7. You are the only one with a brand to sell. If you don't fully understand how important it is to sell your wares, you might as well stay at home and feed insects to your Venus flytrap. Create a perimeter around yourself that covers at least  three dozen earshots. Saturate said perimeter with your elevator pitch at regular intervals, similar to a tornado siren.

Now you know how to play the game. Go forth and network. I'm going to sit here and watch the #sxsw feed for a few hours.

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Proposed Book Cover for I Challenge You To a Douche

I have an idea for a business book, but I'm really lazy. Sending off book proposals takes time and energy and follow-up and seems so last century. However, I have a burning desire to cash in on the whole business book thingy. I suppose I could write the book on spec, but that takes away from my Wii, Twitter, and beer drinking time. So then it struck me: I'll just write an open query letter and wait for the check. So here it is:

Dear all business book publishers in the whole world:

It is apparent that anybody can write a business book of some sort and it's common knowledge that sales of business books are directly proportional to the douchiness of their authors. Lately a strong trend toward massive cultural douchebaggery in the business world indicates there is a market for unapologetic douche books. I Challenge You To a Douche will be the sort of book to lay it all out there without the messy metaphors for dick behavior and excuses hidden behind corporate altruism.

Through extensive research conducted by my own passive observations, unapologetic douches are getting away with murder. While this is presently somewhat profitable, I believe the next trend will be how-to guides on how to piss off people and alienate oneself from friends and family, all for the sake of a buck. I can extrapolate trends from political book sales. Some of the biggest douches of our time are authoring best-selling books that are nothing more than agenda-driven manifestos intended to polarize people into one of two strict philosophical camps that exist solely for best-selling douches to exploit. Current American culture has already become jaded with politics and economics, so business books must ratchet up to the next level or they'll go unnoticed.

With social media on the rise, douchebaggery is at an all-time high. Business authors must be willing to whore themselves out to any and every conference, speaking engagement, presser, and influential cougar. Naturally as a yet unpublished author, I'm not running in those circles yet, but am willing to make an ass out of myself if it means I won't dry-rot in a cubicle until I deplete my half-life. I am more than willing to do press junkets, book tours, and even appear as a Fox News commentator (please provide details of mental health insurance coverage). I'll even do lesser known venues like PBS or MSNBC. Again, me=whore.

As for marketing the book, I am probably not the best model to put on the cover. My balding, bulbous head may confuse people into thinking the book is about the Death Star. I suggest  you ask Sean Hannity to model for me. Not only is he one of the biggest douchebags in modern society, but his hair somehow mesmerizes the wallet. His mountain of cash and over-saturation in all forms of media are a testament to his hypnotic do.

I have prepared an outline for the chapters to be included in I Challenge You to a Douche:

• Introduction by Bernie Madoff
• Chapter 1: Seven Habits To Make You Highly Affected
• Chapter 2: Getting Things Done is for Schmucks
• Chapter 3: The Toyota Way: 14 Ways to Cover-Up Mistakes
• Chapter 4: The Filth Discipline
• Chapter 5: Unleashing the Idea Anti-Virus
• Chapter 6: I Poisoned My Cheese and Left It For You to Find
• Chapter 7: Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Red Dad, Dead Dad
• Chapter 8: Beyond Baked Solid
• Chapter 9: The Tip of Your Point: How Little Things Can Be Mocked
• Chapter 10: What the Dog Humped

Like most modern business books, all research will be non-scientific and subjective to suit whatever point I'm trying to make. In addition the text of I Challenge You to a Douche will be laced with arrogant business jargon, meaningless graphs and charts, and anecdotes from my own experience that can't possibly apply to any other situation. However, upon completion the reader will feel good about being a douche and will shell out for my follow-up book: I Know Where Your Children Sleep: A Guide To Motivating People.

Please contact me if you feel you can rescue me from my Dilbert-esque existence. Checks must be in US dollars and contain lots of zeros.

You're Welcome,

MK Anderson

Cheesy Stock Image

Suckcess 101 is a program I developed after years of meticulous research performed with Google and tequila. I have found the true path to success isn't in giving. Giving is for losers who refuse to support people with drive and ambition, like me. These so-called "givers" throw their money down the toilet every day by forking over wads of cash to charities and even their own children. The real secret of success is to SUCK the very life from everyone around you. So instead of success, you need to achieve "suckcess".

Below is my list of ten things you need to know to suckceed on the Internet. It's a little preview into my Suckcess 101 seminar and naturally, you're welcome.

1. Twisted Lister

First and foremost is you must create lists for everything you can think of. Everybody knows MTV rotted intellectual culture a long time ago and the average American is dumber than Nina Blackwood's pet rock. If you don't spoon feed people with bite-sized lists, you might as well attend a Lord of the Rings Elvish language meetup wearing your best command HIp and speaking Klingon. Every time you write a blog article, make sure it starts with the number of ways you're going to insult your readers' intelligence. Hey, they can't say they didn't see it coming.

2. Be LOL Cutesy

When writing email, chatting, or letting your Facebook friends know when you are napping, keep this in mind: LOL Speak is the new baby talk. U cn haz mpakt on ur peeps & tweeps by just mixin teh lang, yo. This technique will really get you noticed if you're over 35, and nobody ever tires of reading "teh internets".  Good times.

3. Clichés Aren't Just for Breakfast Anymore

By and large you can break the ice with clichés. They roll off the tongue and you can mark my words that good writing is stuffed to the gills with clichés.

4. Reinvent Your Douchy Imaginary Title

One sure way to collect followers like a summer marsh attracts gnats is to come up with a better douchy imaginary job title than everyone else. Here are some examples: Thought Leader, Conversation Catalyst, Progressive Thinker, Web 10.1 Guru, Underlying Thought Expert, Process Improvement Psychologist, Useless Consulting Strap-On, and Second Coming Know-It-All, to name a few. The point is that if you have read this far and you think teh internets were made just so you can gouge the ignorant, then you must have a douchy imaginary title that sets you apart from the other douches.

5. Stalk the Talk

Especially with Twitter, you cannot suckceed just online. You have to be an ass in person. Fortunately, you can because some marks are foolish enough to update tweets with their actual real world location. With your iPhone, Google Maps, and some extra gas money, you can triangulate your targets and visit them where they live. First perfected by Jehovah Witnesses and short-sleeved Mormons, home visits can increase your level of suck to new vacuum pressures.

6. Turn "Effort" Into a Verb

Just effort to do it often.

7. Endlessly Tweet Marketing News

So you've signed up for Twitter and you aren't sure you have enough to say? Don't worry, there are suckateering rules for that too. First of all, automate everything you do on Twitter. Load your autofollow utilities with every dictionary word and follow everybody. Yes, follow the whole Twitter. Next use your Twitter tools to auto-post news from every PR and marketing news site on the Web. People cannot get enough PR and marketing news, no matter what profession they're in. If you want to branch out to also cover tech news and social media news, make sure you only include reports written by and for the PR industry so there isn't any confusion as to what you're all about. Otherwise you'll end up as somebody's tech support bitch and you don't have enough time to not make money.

8. RT and Follow Friday Fun

On Twitter, it's very important to include in every tweet "RT this" with an optional please. Getting RTs turns your followers into your minions. Another form of enslavement is called Follow Friday. To participate you load your entire list of people you think you follow and add the #ff hash tag and you're off and running. After several hundred tweets, all of your followers have nothing but your list of Follow Friday mentions in their stream and then feel obligated to return the favor so you don't chastise them on Public Humiliation Saturday. Everybody wins.

9. Turn Facebook Into All About You

So while everybody on Facebook has been connecting with high school friends and passing list memes, you're busting ass trying to make a buck. It's time they know it. Create yourself a fan page on Facebook and start spamming the crap out of people on Twitter to become your fans. The best way to do this is to promise some sort of reward. I suggest you give away a Mac Book Pro because everybody wants one. (You don't really have to actually give one away. I'm pretty sure nobody expects to win one and you can always say you gave it to one of your other 112 Twitter names.) If you have friends on Facebook, keep sending them requests to become fans even if they ignore it. Odds are they will eventually become a fan to shut your ass up. Again, everybody wins.

10. It's All About the Numbers

Finally, if you have followed my advice, then you have over 4,500,000,000,000 followers on Twitter and your site visitors continually crash the East Coast power grids. You have to figure out a way to shake everyone down for a buck. Your best bet is ask all of your follows for $100 to have you get offline permanently. But really how you get money from these people is your own damn problem.

So that's a preview of my Suckcess 101 seminar. I will probably have materials you can only find all over the internet, but printed out and crammed into 3-ring binders. I will also have some kind of PowerPoint presentation that I'll read in front of you so you feel like you got something for your money.

Please note: I own the stock image in this article. I intentionally wanted the watermark in there to support  the douche baggery promoted. This work is satire as I would never ever use 3-ring binders in my seminar. That's just too much damn work.

Eyesore Near My House