[INTERNAL MEMO DO NOT MAKE PUBLIC] Rejected Article Roundup VII: electric fuckyourself

AS PART OF AN ONGOING EFFORT TO PUT COMEDY BLOGS NO ONE READS IN THEIR PLACE, TEAM WEEDSM0RK HAS COMPROMISED THIS SITE AND WILL BE SLOWLY PUBLICIZING INTERNAL MESSAGES OVER THE COMING WEEKS UNLESS THE SITE OWNERS MINT FIFTY SM0RKJOINT TOKENS ON THE ETHEREUM WEEDCHAIN. GREETZ TO TEAM ꓘↃꓵSꓘↃꓵℲ, COLLECTIVE OF CROWS, AND THE HACKTIVISM.CO.UK MOD TEAM!

Hey Robbi, I know you wanted this by tax day, and I'm sorry, but between the discord drama, the banner ad people getting mad at us again for "adult content," and all the fucking your mom I've been doing, it's been a busy few months.

I'm joking, obviously, we don't have ads.

Anyway, the format's the usual one. If you need it explained again, that triggers the clause in your contract where I get your power of attorney, and that would be incredibly lucrative for me since you still refuse to sign away your half of the royalties on that one thing, so like. Test me, motherfucker.

Concept: A riff on moviepooper.com where it's novelruiner.com and it's just the endings of various fictional sci-fi novels

Excerpt:

John R. Specialchosen sighed contentedly as the autopilot gently set his starfighter down in the Resistance's hangar. Glittering holoconfetti drifted through the canopy as it swung open, letting in the sounds of the joyful ongoing celebration of his impossible victory over the negabots and the destruction of the Misery Core. His former rival approached in a hovering tank full of gland-expressed Auresian healjuice, his space injuries already visibly reversing with the help of organic gland nanites. The intercom on the tank crackled to life, and he demanded an explanation.
 
"How did you do it, John? How did you nail that ion trajectory? A thousand psionic calcuclusters couldn't have finished autotargeting in the split second you were in range, and I know for a fact your starfighter only has three!"
 
John smiled. Remembering the wise advice of Glorkrox-sensei, John placed his hand warmly on the nearest part of the tank to Colonel McNelson's shoulder and said, with inner peace, "I aligned my cone."

Reason for Rejection: I don't want to write two more fake novel endings in this style, and then do a framing device that explains the site concept. Exhausting.

Concept: Jax Hamleg from the hurricane article and the lootbox article documents the process of dehumanizing himself and facing to bloodshed, using a tutorial on the official bloodshed wiki

Excerpt:

I definitely understand my wife's trepidation. The wiki may be official, and this tutorial has been approved and tested by the broader bloodshed community, but I did have to stop and ask myself if I really wanted to no longer be human. A human being cannot truly face to bloodshed without letting go of the fundamental thing that makes us human, that defines humanity. I realized I wasn't ready yet to admit that fundamental truth that would sever my tether from humanhood forever and ascend to a higher state of consciousness. I refuse to accept that the original Nine Inch Nails version of "Hurt" is just better than the overrated Johnny Cash cover.

Reason for Rejection: Just a very thin initial premise and I couldn't think of a joke answer for what makes us human that was funny enough and also made sense to delay explicitly stating until the end of the article as a punchline. The placeholder music opinion one is also totally out of character for Jax Hamleg, who I've always envisioned as being not very strongly into music at all except for a secret passion for Eurovision he's deeply ashamed of.

Concept: A riff on one of those cancel culture personal stories about how someone did a genuinely bad thing and is facing reasonable proportionate consequences and this is an untenable tragedy, and then it escalates/transitions into the writer haughtily liveblogging a horror movie situation where the cancelled subject is stalking a group of survivors including the reporter herself through an appropriate location (abandoned hospital or something) to kill and silence them, and like the survivor group gets whittled down until the final non-reporter girl kills the cancelled guy before succumbing to her injuries, so the only survivor of this incident is the reporter, who never stops framing it as the victims being uppity bitches holding back this perfect cinnamon roll REAL victim, of cancel culture

Excerpt:

And really, in the end that's the legacy of the #metoo movement: A young man with a promising career in our underfunded medical system cut down in the prime of his life for the supposed 'crime' of stabbing privileged ivy league nursing students with a scalpel so that their blue blood slowly fills up a tank and drowns a sex worker who was too busy posting filth on onlyfans to notice the syringe full of horse tranquilizer entering her artery. Before she decided she was too lazy to keep pressure on her mere fourteen puncture wounds, I asked Millicent (a pseudonym) if she was happy that with one axe blow she prevented a talented future surgeon from saving hundreds (maybe thousands) of lives much more valuable than hers. She didn't bother spitting out any of the perfectly good blood she was choking on to answer, but I like to think she would have said "I support J.K. Rowling."

Reason for Rejection: Writing that made me feel like viscerally awful and gross and then Elizabeth Weil, who wrote the piece about the teen sex criminal that made me angry enough to go to that dark place initially, had her lawyer call me to demand to know who leaked the draft of the piece she's writing for the NYT, and I tried to tell them I made it up as satire about how much of a rancid soulless vulture you have to be to write sympathetic pieces about awful people facing mild consequences for their actions, and then I got a call waiting from my dad's number and switched over and it was Bill Pullman's voice saying "Dick Laurent is dead" and then I woke up in a cold sweat and calmed down a little and then laid back down and the jump scare monster cop from In The Mouth Of Madness was lying in bed next to me and I woke up again with a start, ostensibly for real this time, and decided this was still probably too dark to be funny.

Concept: A bunch of urban legends about props at a Planet Hollywood location, confirming some and debunking others

Excerpt:

[The following was originally published in the Amalgamated New Hampshire Beacon-Tribune, and is reposted here as part of an ongoing content sharing agreement.]
 
Manchester is not just the most populous city in our beloved home state, but in all of the vastness of northern New England (which also includes Maine, Vermont, and Milwaukee 2), so it's easy to see why we're blessed with so many restaurant franchise locations. From authentic italian fare at Papa John's and the Olive Garden to the exciting and deliciously experimental English/Australian fusion cuisine at The Queen's Gambit, Manchester offers a myriad of choices to the hungry New Hampshey.
 
It's no surprise, then, that this overabundance of culture proved to be too much for Manchester's Planet Hollywood location. In a food (and literal) desert like Los Angeles, the lack of other options drives customers into Planet Hollywood by the busload, but in such a choice-rich environment as Manchester, there simply was not a compelling reason to pay $15 for an appetizer platter of mediocre chicken wings tossed in a sauce "inspired by the delicioso filmography of Robert Rodrigeuz."

Reason for Rejection: Decided I needed to nail down a specific location and got sidetracked writing all that nonsense about New Hampshire, and just kinda trailed off and lost steam.

Concept: A compilation of rejected article concepts like this one, but cleaned up a bit for public consumption, definitely do not post that cancel culture one, it's so fucking depressing

Reason for Rejection: Just way too meta, kind of lazy? Like I guess theoretically less lazy than the old patch notes articles or that draft you wrote of the most popular podcasts in Hell (which is a great concept I hope you someday do justice instead of borderline-plagiarizing the wiki plot summary of the Divine Comedy) but not really up to the standard we've established with more recent work.

Anyway yeah. That's all that was in the hopper since the last one. Hope no one compromises the site and posts this publicly! That'd be basically the worst thing ever, and I'd pay any amount of money to make it stop, even if it was in the form of crypto, and you know how much I hate crypto.

HA HA HA