That Last Flower Had a Bee On It

If today's update has any real inspiration it is those OxyClean commercials where that guys screams about how great OxyClean is. I imagined that guy selling vitamins over the phone and just yelling in people's ears about how great or amazing these stupid ripoff vitamins are. Then I imagined him lay some ridiculous sales pitch on someone who he wants to hire to help him sell vitamins over the phone. I tried to incorporate the whole "land of broken dreams" idea of Hollywood with this idea and I'm not really sure whether or not it worked. I wasn't trying to make a deep statement or anything like that, just that people go with dreams of stardom and end up working phonesex lines in a warehouse or selling vacuums door-to-door.

There wasn't enough page space to include this image in the update, but I wanted to:

This may surprise you, but some of the authors here at Something Awful really hate writing Awful Links of the Day. It's fun and games when you first start working here and you get to post all of the horrible links you've discovered on your own, but after a few months coming up with a funny site and then writing about it after you've written an entire article is less than pleasant. Livestock and I constantly tease each other about how much we hate writing the ALoDs and we'll send messages to torment one another when we know the other one has to do an ALoD that night. The average conversation is something like this:

Livestock: How is your update coming?

GeistEditor: Not too good, I'm pretty drained.

Livestock: Well look at the bright side, you've got an ALoD to do!

GeistEditor: AUUUUGH!

Or

GeistEditor: So what are you writing about for the ALoD today?

Livestock: Fuck you!

It's not that ALoDs are a bad idea, it's just that it feels like we've already written about every conceivable topic and dredging the Internet for a site usually turns up a topic we've covered long ago. Probably the most maddening thing about the Awful Link is when you think you've done a really great update and then you end up receiving tons of email about some mistake you made in the ALoD. It's like submitting a great resume for a job you really want and then the whole thing gets rejected because the envelope was the wrong color.

Especially fun is when you do blind Google searches on some horrible topic and end up with a virus that takes two hours to clean up. Remember, we put ourselves in the line of fire for you almost every time we do an Awful Link.

That isn't to say that I always dislike doing the ALoD. Every once in a while a really good site will come along for us to make fun of and it will be a pleasure to do so.

– Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons (@sexyfacts4u)