Tag: writer

Creator Highlight: Amanda Rosenberg

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

In this last highlight post until I am again able to remove myself from capitalism for a while, let’s look at another funny person I found on Medium, Amanda Rosenberg. She writes funny stuff and is an editor at some group thing-or-other on Medium, I don’t know how it works, it just has a name, actually, maybe it’s the banner that’s important, which would make sense since it went with the ugliest color they could find, come on, that’s not not nearly the ugliest color. Not nearly gray enough.

She has also written some pieces on depression. I’m here to talk about the funny bits.

Amanda has actually written quite a few pieces of mock company email strings such as from CEOs. I um. I assume they’re mock ups. I assume I’m using that word right. I assume these aren’t real emails. Here’s “Emails From A CEO Who Just Has A Few Changes To The Website“, with infinite scrolling and this amazing section:

What if the homepage was just a picture of a white wall? Think about it. People will be like “Where am I? What’s happening?” and isn’t that the whole point of having a site?

There’s also “Emails From A CEO Who Just Had A Great Branding Idea“, featuring a website covered in human skin. How’s that for the ugliest color to be found?

Next there’s this piece about Apple removing the headphone jack. I have never used an Apple product. I can only assume this is accurate! There are also these amazing “Motivational Startup Taglines” such as “BUILD THE PAST, IN THE PRESENT, WITH FUTURE MONEY,” and “EMPOWER, OVERPOWER, CAULIFLOWER.” Though I prefer eggplant. After all, there is no “can’t” in “eggplant”.

Um. Let’s move on.

Last one, and definitely the most powerful of the bunch, is “My Thoughts On The Brexit Vote“, and if you read this, Amanda, I am in no way trying to downgrade your other stuff in favor of what does appear to be random keyboard mashings! (Because of course I am certain every single letter in that piece was chosen with precision and dexterity? Dexterity is a thing people use to choose letters, I am pretty sure.)

Anyway, that’s some highlights for the sharp-witted Amanda Rosenberg. I’m out for…

Wait, you know what? No. One more thing.

“I Replaced The Word ‘Millennials’ With ‘43-Year-Old White Men’ And Now These Headlines Are *Italian Chef Kissing Fingers Gesture*”

It’s a pretty simple piece that just changes one term, but, here’s the thing. Apparently there was a little hubbub about a week ago about an editor-in-chief on the news site Mother Jones tweeting about hating millennials because they won’t vote for Hillary Clinton (or something–the tweet has since been deleted).

“43-Year-Old White Men Just Aren’t That Into Hillary Clinton, and it Could Cost Her the Election”

Mrlneh? I think maybe headlines related to Trump are even better. “Can Donald Trump win over 43-Year-Old White Men?” Although just about anything related to the election seems to work pretty well. Unrelated to the election but:

“Will the Left Survive the 43-Year-Old White Men?”

Actually you know the original piece I didn’t find too funny, but apparently when the idea is applied to actual series-sounding titles with possible ramifications on the real world and not just weird faddish articles I find it funny! Look I may be editorializing a little here but I’m pretty sure what we can learn from this is that I’m terrible.

Amanda Rosenberg! Check her out! Her writing, I mean.

Excerpt from Slubes new edition

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

If you may recall from near a year ago when I started posting Darmenzi chapters, the occasional interruption of Duth Olec (and Wally Plotch’s responses) in the story has been redesigned so that it is easier to understand, now being in the form of something like a chat log. As Darmenzi began with this, and the old Slubes began with an introduction by Wally and Duth, the new Slubes begins with Wally trying to figure out what he’s doing and Duth being me.

Continue reading “Excerpt from Slubes new edition” →

A Note from an Author

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

You may have read that last post, got to the end, and thought “what is going on, why did the font change, who is the narrator arguing with”. (And you may have read that sentence and thought “what does he mean ‘why did the font change’ I don’t remember that”, in which case you read an earlier version of the post.) Anyway, if you were reading Slubes, chances are you would have seen this first:

 

A Note from an Author

Good day, readers. My name is Wally Plotch. I suppose you could call me the writer of this work. Duth Olec prefers to call me the court stenographer, but even simply stenographer would not be wholly accurate. I guess I’m somewhere between a reporter and a writer. Duth is the creator and the presenter. It is our combined efforts that bring this story to you.

And any problems you have with it are Wally’s fault!

Hey! No! You said you wouldn’t interfere on this first outing!

Well we haven’t outed yet, have we? I just want everybody to know that it’s all Wally’s fault.

Stop that. Or I’ll make you do this on your own.

All right, all right. Go ahead; I’ll get things started…

 

In this novel, as in probably all my novels will be, the narrator is Wally Plotch; he’s not thrilled about the job, but at least I’m there to spur him along, or distract him, or whatever it is I do. To distinguish between his writing and my occasional input (It doesn’t happen very often, I only speak up when I’m needed, I do not abuse this power!), different fonts are used (not the ones you see here, this is just for the blog)… except in the e-book version, which uses a uniform font throughout. Instead they’re enclosed within {}.

Also, you may have noticed a footnote in yesterday’s excerpt. There’s footnotes! After all, this is a crazy new world that you’ve never seen, gaddfern it! You need to know what the hex is going on sometimes! Carp!

Now that I’ve told you about the semantics, or whatever, maybe next time I’ll post something that will make people interested! Well, tomorrow’s Mother’s Day, so I might take the day off, and I take every Monday off because I’m a jerk who likes to laugh at people who have jobs (STRESSLESS), so Tuesday might be more! Might be not! I’m not sure how much of the novel I will actually go and post up here, but we’ll see.