State of the Website Address 2020

Plan? What plan?

Let me let you in on a little secret: I’ve never had any idea what I’m doing.

Every year, I post a State of the Website Address making all kinds of empty promises. I may have actually kept one or two of them over the years, but for the most part it’s the same thing: I talk a big game, come out of the gate strong, lose steam a few months in, pick up steam again towards the end of the year, wash rinse repeat.

Let’s take a look at the last one.

In my SotWA for last year, I teased the following:

  • Making the podcasts bi-weekly.
  • Uploading the podcasts to a proper hosting service, and getting them up on iTunes and other venues.
  • A new YouTube series involving a priest.
  • Another YouTube series involving a parody of Alex Jones.
  • A music album (or at least a song).
  • Building a community.

I literally did none of those things.

Being the grandiose jerk I am, I then went and posted a follow-up to my 2019 SotWA, where I changed my name and made some more empty promises. I even called myself out on making empty promises and promised to stop making empty promises. So much for that, huh?

So from now on, I’m simply going to talk about what I want to do. What I want and what I will do can easily be two different realities. I want to bang Scarlett Johansson and Amy Lee from Evanescence in a no-holds-barred three-way fuckfest that would make Charlie Sheen weep with pride and envy, but that doesn’t mean I will. By saying that I want to do things, I can effectively absolve myself of any guilt or blame if I don’t do them. After all, I never promised I would do those things, I just said that I wanted to do them.

So let’s talk about things I want to do.

want to keep going with the new podcast I’ve started this month, Delusions of Grandeur. I actually had fun making that, and I have more ideas for future episodes. The podcast I attempted to do last year with my good friend Torbrex was a flop for a variety of reasons. Some of those reasons were:

  • Doing them live sucks, because I’m a terrible live speaker.
  • Doing them on Twitch sucks, because Twitch is a shitty venue that discourages growth for people at the bottom to keep unfunny dorks like Dr. Disrespect at the top. You’re also expected to monitor and address the few people who do show up in chat. I don’t have time for that, I have a show to do.
  • I had to balance these with routine streams.
  • Discord would routinely crap out on us.
  • The dynamic between me and Brex wasn’t that strong. There’s more pressure when you’re doing a live show, and I think that hampered our normal dynamic.
  • Doing a podcast with a Blue Snowball sucks, especially when you live in a ghetto with loud cars driving by every five seconds with fart can mufflers and blasting shitty Spanish gangster rap with bass that shakes your house. A dynamic mic works way better for recording a podcast. Unfortunately, the dynamic mic I have (the Behringer XM8500) records only in mono, which means I have to feed it through Audacity to get the final product in stereo and reduced hissing. Not good for live broadcasting, but great for recording.
  • Scheduling. Having to operate based around someone else’s schedule blows. It blows even more when you have to work around someone else’s schedule while only having one day off a week yourself to do everything.

I think Delusions of Grandeur (Let’s call it DoG from now on) has a chance to turn out better for me because I’m not doing it live, I’m using a better venue than Twitch, I stopped streaming, I don’t have to worry about a dynamic with a co-host, and with my current job I have weekends off and zero stress. My current plan is one new podcast a month, but I want to eventually bring that up to one every couple of weeks.

As far as those Twitch streams, they aren’t coming back. Twitch sucks. I’m working on a follow-up article to the “My experience being a Twitch streamer” article that will go into this in more detail, but Twitch is a heap of cancer, AIDS, and unfunny bullshit. As I said before, Twitch is designed to maintain the status quo with corporate-friendly losers like Shroud or Dr. Disrespect (whose real name is literally Herschel the 4th) staying securely at the top doing nothing while us piss-poor peasants at the bottom have to fight for the scraps and join streamer groups that are basically glorified pyramid schemes, or play “networking” games (“networking” meaning “I’ll only pop my head into your streams if you come to mine, otherwise I’m too busy for you.”). Seriously, practically everyone on Twitch is a cunt. During my time I only met a handful of people who weren’t leeches, clones, or total fake douchebags. Aside from all of that, I didn’t want to become known as just another cookie cutter gamer. I’ve been writing for over 13 years, I’ll be damned if all people focus on is me playing video games. So no more Twitch streams.

I haven’t done many YouTube videos either, mostly because they require more time and effort than they seem to be worth. I do have many ideas for videos though, it’s just a matter of getting my crew together and making them, which is probably the hardest part.

I’ve also been having a blast shitposting on Twitter, so I encourage you, the reader, to follow me on there if you have Twitter. Hell, if you DON’T have a Twitter account you should make one and follow me. Contrary to popular belief, it’s actually pretty easy to ignore all the hardcore political assholes on Twitter. Here’s a great way to avoid political bullshit on Twitter: Don’t follow your favorite celebrities. I made the mistake of following people like Danny Trejo and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and not only did I get bombarded with their politics but Twitter also assumed I wanted to see more politics from other assholes and kept sneaking stuff into my feed under the guise of “Followed by Danny Trejo and Arnold Schwarzenegger”. For some strange reason actors and actresses all think they’re politicians and are qualified to tell the world how to govern itself. Thankfully I’m qualified to tell them all to go fuck themselves. Since I unfollowed most of the actors I like I’ve gotten significantly less political bullshit on my feed from both sides of the spectrum. Unfortunately, I follow Gritty (the mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers) along with several radio personalities from the local station I listen to (Marissa Magnata will slide into my DMs any day now asking for that date, I just know it!) so Twitter now assumes I like sports and fills my feed with sports-related things that I don’t care about. Still less infuriating than politics. My point here is, create a damn Twitter account just to follow me.

All in all, I have a decent year planned out in my head for this site. Let’s see what happens.

By Angry_Jerk

The CEO/Editor-in-chief of AJnet, and the current king of internet ranting. Hailing from the fine village of Northeast Philadelphia, AJ has been creating content on the internet for over 15 years. None of it has really been funny or entertaining, but he keeps trying anyway. When he’s not creating new articles for the site, he can be found hitting the weights, watching anime, or playing retro video games.