Just in case anyone was keeping track, the whole my-credit-not-showing thing got resolved very, very quickly. Cracked is actually very good at fixing this kind of problem quickly, in case this didn't come across in the last post. they actually are really good people to do work for in general, in case you were thinking of trying that.

I know what you are thinking. It has to be something like "Who is Elijah torp? Is he some kind of varient on Jacopo? Why is his blog listed on one of Jacopo's articles? Why is there so little content on his blog?"

I understand all of your questions, so here are the answers:

Elijah torp is a man that some, mostly himself, feel might be the finest human being ever built.

I am not Jacopo and am not likely to be. I do, of course, envy his article count, because shit he has a ton of articles.

I and a few other people cowrote that article. Besides me, C.K. Bond and Benjamin FA also worked on the article. And, of course, Jacopo.

there isn't a lot of content on the blog because I forget, sometimes, to blog. By sometimes I mean all the time. Even when I have good things to blog about, like yesterday when my son shot me in my bare, open eyeball with a nerf disk and nearly killed me. If you wish to come back, I'm going to do a new blog post every day for three days running after this to sortof make it up to you.

I love you, Cracked readers. Have a good sunday.

The 90's, generic style

I've decided it's funny to create generic lines that could be, but aren't, from 90's Disney made-for-tv movies aimed at people in their young teens. Here are some.

1. "You really built a robot?" "No, but they don't have to know that".

2. "That's Brent Hartigan. Nobody in town can beat him on rollerblades. Nobody."

3. "What's he doing?" "Don't worry. That would beat the school record. There's no way he can jump that high."

4. "Who's that?" "Alyson Michelin, but don't even think about it." "Why? Is she out of my league?" "Alyson Michelin is out of everybody's league.

Make me more of these in comments. They are as mind-heroin to me.

    Recently, I've more and more often found myself picking verbal fights on various politically based website's comment sections. There isn't any sane reason why anyone would do this, and I suspect a large part of why I do is to either practice writing or to vent some of my all-natural manly aggression. Since the only other way I know to do the latter is to convince my friends to box with me, and since they usually don't want to box and I'm no good at it, Its probably better for me - and them - that I do this.

     That being said, I've had the opportunity to codify some of how I generally handle  the arguments, and I've made a cheater's guide to winning them, at least most of the time. You should note that these don't work in a well-moderated environment or in one where you can't really expect any sympathy from 99% of the room, like Cracked's Hitler's Brain forum or very clearly partisan sites where you take the opposite view, respectively.

      Clever or smart-ass readers will notice that I include a few argumentative fallacies as tools here; I think they are useful in this context, but I wouldn't try them with anybody who knows a whole lot more than you. In no particular order, here are the tips I can think of right now.

1. Don't focus on convincing your opponent

      In most arguments about politics or religion, nobody wins the argument in the traditional sense(I.E. you convince the other guy and he starts thinking like you). On the internet it becomes more even difficult to win in that sense, partially because people play dirtier when they can't see you face to face. It's also more difficult because when people have conversations in person, empathy kicks in and you don't start out throwing sand in each other's eyes right away.

      The solution is to not focus on convincing your target of your points, but to make your points while systematically destroying his from the viewpoint of an impartial observer. You have to play to the invisible crowd a little bit, and form your arguments with the idea of them listening in. To do that, you need to:

2. Go crazy with the sourcing

     You know what separates you from any random jackass on the internet? Nothing, that's what. Chances are, you aren't famous. You aren't special, and the people listening in are just passing by. That's where sourcing comes in: if you pick any relatively non-kooky website to get sources that support what you were going to say anyway, It's like adding another more respected person to your debate team; enough good sources, and you can mob your opponent until he or she crumbles.

     A good source weights your argument to a point where only another source that is just as good or better will keep the other guy in the game, and a surprising amount of the time people will forfeit arguments they would have died to win just to save the trouble of using google for five seconds. Of course, occasionally you get someone who is so oblivious to the concept of citation that nothing dents their resolve to be right, so you then have to:

3. Be 25% nicer than you actually are.

     Remember the people from 1., the ones you were trying to convince? They generally aren't reading two random dudes going back and forth in a comments section so they can learn the finer points of why you hate or love Ron Paul or Paul Ryan; they want action. They are much closer to being Romans watching gladiators chop each other up, and they want blood. That's where being too nice comes in.

     Being too nice or too mean both have specific uses in an internet argument, and if you use them at the wrong time, you can either come off as a weakling or a lunatic who flies off the handle at a moment's notice. You have to pick your timing carefully; If your opponent goes mean too early, or from the very beginning, sometimes you can calm him to death by disagreeing with his point while being slightly(but only slightly) condescending the whole time. The idea is to get them going to the point where they say and do unreasonable things, while all the time you sit calmly off the the side, letting them look crazy and dig their own hole. You look rational because they can't, which makes them more irration, which makes you look even better. Its a vicious cycle that mainly just benefits you for once.



     There are, of course, a few more ways to go about this; I'll get into some tomorrow, plus the only real benefit to this that doesn't involve hitting people less. As for now, I've got to go nurse a viscous headache. with some reasonable amount of sleep before I have to get up and do some more brutal, unforgiving things to make money.

-Ben

P.S. Did you see that I have ads on the site? You wouldn't think that if you clicked a relevant one that you could make me some cash, but you totally can, because this is America.

Got a blurb from John Cheese today for helping with one of his columns. This is yet another triumph of random general knowledge.

-Elijah

New Cracked article up today! You already knew that, though, since that is almost for sure how you got here.

This one was a lot of fun to write, and its neat being able to go through something you did after the editors get to it and find out they changed surprisingly little. What they did change made it much, much better, though.

Now I get to sit around today and watch that hit counter go up. It's like virtual numeric heroin, and help me I can't stop.

Apparently the adverts for this blog have taken a look at my limited list of posts and decided that this is a blog about pawn shops. I in turn now wish that I had thought of that first.

     Oh, I forgot in the last post to mention this, but the upside to this week is that the air conditioning is fixed on my work truck. I live in Arizona, and heat makes me stupid, so this should keep me from degrading into a simpering monkey over the next couple months.

     The downside to that is I picked up a stray bolt from the work I did to make the air conditioning work, and one of my tires deflated and popped completely off the wheel. The upside to that is that apparently you can buy tires in stores now, and they are much easier to change than A/C components.

-Elijah

     So our apartment got broken into. I'm writing this from our crappy desktop instead of my (equally crappy) laptop. Apparently sliding glass doors are pretty easy to open and it only takes about twenty seconds to sweep through and steal some electronics and most of my wife's jewelry.

     As much as I'd like to whine about the laptop, I can deal with that and it seems that I might have another one pretty soon because of the kindness of some very good friends. The real bitch of it is my wife's stuff; we aren't wealthy to begin with, so I haven't been able to give her a lot. Most of what she has she brought in from before our marriage, and most of that is gone now.

     The cops say that there is a monitoring system for pawn shops that might make our stuff turn up. The problem is that the system itself is run by Phoenix P.D., and my experience with them has been that if there isn't any money in it for the city, they don't do a whole lot. That's probably why I saw a total of seven cops writing traffic tickets on the way to work on saturday, but it took a cop three hours to show up on sunday after the burglary to do what amounts to some quick note-taking and then nothing else.

    On an up note, this has caused me to go to literally 10-20 pawn shops in the last few days. I've learned some interesting things:

1. Most pawn shop employees are missing teeth. This isn't true of the Big Nice Brand pawn shop, but it's true of all the lower level ones.

2. Tools are really, really cheap at pawn shops. At least hand tools are, and those are the only kind that I'm not afraid of. I can go in with ten dollars tomorrow and buy 40 ratchet heads, for instance. That's value, right there, and maybe next time I have to fix my air conditioning I won't have to do it with vice grips.

3. The nicer the area you are in, the nicer the pawn shop stuff. I'm pretty sure this isn't purely because of what they take in; its too well targeted. I am imagining they only keep what might sell in any given area. I think they send out most of the nicer stuff to other shops when shitty pawnshops take it in, and the nicer ones melt the crappy stuff for gold. Xboxes, tools, and guitars are pretty universal.

Line breaks weird functionality

     So apparently Blogger defaults to "HTML" mode for making posts, which means I had to go back this morning and add line breaks and indentation to everything again. On the off chance somebody saw it before I fixed it, I promise I know what paragraphs are.

-Elijah

Learning to write voiceless

     So my first and biggest goal in learning how to work as a writer is something that will sound terrible to most people who want to be or are trying to be writers. I'm trying to learn to completely suppress my personal "voice", or the tone that any writer naturally has or develops in his or her writing. Eliminating my verbal personality might seem counter-intuitive, since what I'd eventually like to be doing is holding down a regular column somewhere, but there is a pretty decent reason for it.

     At the moment, I think my best shot at ever getting any kind of decent job is building up a monster of a resume, and that means doing as many different kinds of writing for as many people as possible. I need to be able to illustrate to a potential client that I can write what they want, and to some people that means showing them that I have the ability to stop writing what I want.

     Take pure bottom-end content generation, for instance. There are a lot of sites out there that generate content for people who can't do or can't do it well themselves. When you write for those kind of sites, you get paid but you don't get credit. In some cases, the clients want to pretend they wrote it themselves, and in some case authorship just doesn't matter, like a description on a retail site for a purse or a pair of sunglasses. For those kinds of jobs, you have to write clean, because you don't actually matter in the process. The idea is just to get a product, written words, out there.

     As I mentioned before, I'm doing some work for Cracked.com, which lets for some reason despite the fact that they really, really shouldn't. Cracked has a very distinctive voice, but its not my voice. Not only do they not need my personal style since they already have their own, but everything I write that doesn't contour to what they are already doing actually makes more work for the editors.

     There are some professional voiceless styles, at least if I understand them correctly. AP style, which is that dry newsprint format, is completely voiceless. It's sortof impressive once you realize that every news story you've ever read could have been written by any journalist as long as they were following the AP Stylebook point for point. Anyway, wish me luck as I squelch my individuality.

-Elijah

Newest/Oldest Post

     If you aren't my Mom, you probably got here through a link on the end of one of my Cracked.com articles. If you are my Mom, hi Mom. Anyway, if you did get here through Cracked, you almost certainly have an inflated view of what I can do based on how great their editorial staff is, and since this is a writing blog you are hoping to learn something.

     One quick note: I'm probably not thoroughly qualified to teach you how to write. Actually, I'm not qualified to teach you to do anything, including writing, unless you want to know how to catch thrown food in your mouth like a seagull(protip: point at the food with your chin.). What I am qualified to do is make a lot of mistakes in a fairly short amount of time, and since I'm trying to become grand champion of the fast-paced world of internet content writing, I figured my mistakes might be good brain-feed for the masses. If not, it could still be entertaining to watch me flail around.

     My basic goal is this: if possible, I'd like to get to a point where I can make basic survival type levels of cash off of writing, no matter what kind of writing that is. What this blog will focus on is various attempts at doing that, as well as an overarching attempt to become a passable writer in the meantime. My secondary goal is to have something productive to point to when I want to stay up late and watch cartoons, and I thank you in advance for facilitating my lies. Stick around, it may end up being fun.


-Elijah