by Awl Sponsors

You may already know Don Hertzfeldt from films like “It’s Such a Beautiful Day,” “The Meaning of Life,” “Billy’s Balloon,” and “Rejected.” His work has played around the world, receiving over 200 awards, and most recently appeared in a special guest appearance on “The Simpsons.” Seven of his films have screened in competition at the Sundance Film Festival, where he is the only filmmaker to have won the overall Grand Jury Prize for Short Film twice.

“World of Tomorrow” tells the story of a young girl named Emily, who meets a clone of herself from the future. According to Splitsider’s Chris Kopcow, “’World Of Tomorrow’ peers into the future to ask big questions about how we live and fail to live, how technology hurts and helps us, how there’s a possibility, however remote, that you may just end up alone and afraid.”

To watch “World of Tomorrow,” simply create a Vimeo account and rent or buy the new season by clicking the “purchase” button in the video player above. Or you can just go here.

Negroni Season is often referred to as “the best thing that The Awl has ever published” or “the only thing The Awl has ever published” or “the best thing on the Internet.” And yet… it was written under a pen name! Are you glad you kept your anonymity?

First of all: none of that is true. But sometimes when people are nice enough to say nice things I am tempted to sing it from the rooftops: OH MY GOD, YOU GUYS IT’S MEEEEEE. But then I remember what a horrible and humiliating experience it was and that I don’t particularly come off looking all that great. The events of Negroni Season were just a brief time of my life but Google searches are forever.

So true. That’s a sort of prudence one doesn’t often see online. So, I think it’s fair to say that we didn’t publish a lot more stories together because there were a lot of questions like, “who looks bad in these stories” and also “is it mean and/or sad to tell these stories” and like “is laughing about this stuff in public the same as laughing about it in private,” right? I mean I could laugh about your (and my own!) love life all day but there’s something about offering it up for consumption that makes it less like a good bar story and more like… something else. Is that stuff you thought about?

The short answer is: No. I wasn’t thinking about anything. When I started writing The Worst Boyfriend in the World stories for The Awl, the site was still in beta mode and the company existed in a living room. I don’t think I thought about anyone really reading it and, as usual, I didn’t think about the future beyond the immediate, “Hey do you know what might be funny…”

Also — I think I only realize this now — I was far too poor for therapy and apparently *this* was how I worked through some stuff. As much as I love reading It Happened To Me kind of stories (and I do), I don’t know if I love being a person who tells them. It’s a weird and private thing to share and it’s hard to read people’s comments on your real life. I’m apparently far too sensitive and grudge hold-y to deal with that. (Cough, cough commenter #3,286.)

I’ve been thinking about this and, this may not result in an actual question, but I think the reason I like reading these stories, and stories like them, is that they alleviate any shame I might have had over similar incidents in my life! Like times when I have been mislead by someone and then gone down a path and then I have, in turn, become my Worst Self. And I hope when people read this they get to breathe a sigh of relief and be like, “OH YEAH sometimes people are just crazy and terrible things happen and it’s a surprise to everyone.”

I am always SHOCKED when people say they can relate to what happened in Negroni Season. Like, REALLY? You guys also toxically dated a terribly damaged weirdo and then screamed about Fucking Negronis and then barfed all over your bathroom? ’Cause that IS comforting. But I think the larger point that we’re all idiots when we’re in love — some to a more ludicrous degree than others — is a fair one and I guess I’m glad I’m not the only one who made some really questionable life choices. ALSO WHY ARE YOU PEOPLE INSISTING NEGRONIS ARE GREAT WHEN THEY ARE SO GROSS.

Well this is the other thing, how can the negroni continue to exist and allegedly grow in popularity!

Negronis really are disgusting. I don’t believe anyone who claims to like them. Of course I haven’t actually tasted one since that night TEN YEARS ago but I still shudder whenever I smell them.

You ruined a cocktail forever. Mazel tov!

OR DID I? Cause I see a lot of people currently tweeting that it’s negroni season as in, yay let’s go drink negronis. A) That is madness. B) I should be getting a cut of something from someone.

I think the two things people ask me most are: 1. are YOU okay, and 2. is HE okay — but they care way more about you. But also: he doesn’t even know about this, that we know of, right?

So, amazingly, The Ex-Boyfriend has no idea that Negroni Season exists. I initially used a pen name because I worried about him seeing it and that it would inspire him to track me down and murder me. (Not really, of course, he’s not murder-y. But he IS very private and would hate this more than anything which may have had a hand in me doing it in the first place.) But I needn’t have worried because as it turns out he is neither on Twitter, nor does he read things on the Internet. (He remembers the events that inspired the writing of Negroni Season, certainly, because boy was that was brought up a lot during the rest of our relationship.) And yes, we’re still in touch and no, we are not together (praise be).

I’m certainly happy to hear that!

As for me, I am great! There were certain life lessons learned and I do think that everything worked out the way it was supposed to… eventually.

I feel like there’s so many questions I CAN’T ask.

Like what? Is he still a big old drunk?

I was going to say “Is he still an asshole,” yes.

He….well, that’s a complicated one and it just makes me want to yammer on and on about The Scorpion and The Frog. Is that an answer? Maybe. I should mention that after NegroniGate we did live together mostly very happily for a good number of years and, I promise, he has a lot of good qualities too that I never wrote about. But… let’s leave it with that I’m glad we’re not married.

Do you feel like this particular Worst Boyfriend In The World like… happened to other people? Is he like a hurricane, or one of those whirlpools in Maine that exists forever? I guess I’m wondering how many writers I can get on this topic. HOW MANY LADIES KNOW HANK THE CHOCOLATE LAB, put up your hands.

Haha. Oh, Hank. From what I’ve heard there are probably some other women who came after me who are not entirely thrilled with him. But as far as I know there wasn’t anything quite as dramatic or ridiculous as this. Certainly nothing involving Campari. Oh wait, come to think about it… there HAVE been some really insane stories, but sadly they are not mine to tell. Hank is still alive, by the way. I miss him and wish dogs could email.

Wow yeah, when is Silicon Valley gonna crack that nut, right?

That is a billion dollar something something.

Photo by Quinn Dombrowski.

“Once I went to a party at Aziz Ansari’s house.”

Gawker Media’s editorial staff is now unionized. Despite a degree of public acrimony, the victory was wide: 80 votes to 27. Congratulations to the writers and editors of Gawker Media, who have submitted themselves to be the subjects of what is at the very least a worthy experiment.

Nick Denton, the company’s founder, is not a leftist. His professed politics do not align with vigorous labor organization. But he has been fairly quiet through this process, verging on supportive. He has offered no resistance. This is interesting! But perhaps makes sense. Ex-editorial director Joel Johnson published some pitched but valuable context in the comments of the victory announcement.

Congratulations, Edit!

I think unionizing was a smart, brave decision, and one that gives you a chance at security in a turbulent environment.

As it’s important to plan, negotiate, and plan to negotiate with as much clarity as possible, here is what I know about Gawker Media, the company. Bear in mind that my knowledge is at least six months out of date, except where it isn’t.

Gawker Media is an advertising-based business, with revenues of around 35- to 45-million dollars a year. There are a few other sources of income: a couple of million for international licensing fees (from the companies that publish international versions, such as Kotaku Australia); and affiliate fees, largely from Amazon, that add another 5–10 million a year. Ad revenue has been growing around 30% a year, which is good, despite relatively flat traffic and somewhat primitive (by Ad World standards) offerings. (No video at scale, negligible mobile innovation.)

Most of that revenue gets spent in the following ways: paying for staff; paying for infrastructure, such as web servers or bandwidth; litigating the ever-present lawsuits, often with third-party counsel; and paying for offices, travel, third-party services (like branding agencies and other consultants) and roof-top parties. That typically leaves a relatively tidy profit of 1–2 million dollars per quarter, which is either kept in a bank account or, recently, spent.

A large amount of Gawker Media’s capital over the last few years has been spent on the expansion of its technology divisions, with a roughly 50/50 split in headcount between the U.S. and Hungary. (The Hungarians and their office are, of course, less expensive than equivalent U.S. counterparts.) That is part of the reason why, when asked what Gawker Media has “spent on Kinja,” Denton is keen to equivocate. Little of the capital spent on Kinja has gone to materiel, since, after all, it’s just code running on servers that were already needed to operate the sites. As an relatively uninformed estimate, it is reasonable to presume that something like $10-$20 million has been spent on the development of Kinja (and its precursors) in payroll alone over the last five years. It’s difficult to make a clear estimate, primarily because it’s difficult to quantify the opportunity losses: how much traffic and potential advertising revenue was lost when the sites were down? How many employee hours were wasted pursuing partnership deals that were abandoned? How much of the development cost of Kinja was wasted in pursuit of dead-end experiments or capricious strategy charges versus the work essential to maintain an online media company’s content management system? (I can take a good guess at that last one, actually: I’d say about 75% of the work on Kinja has wasteful.)

As stewards of your own future at Gawker Media, it’s important to have a full understanding of the business strategy (or lack thereof) of Kinja. The theory, as it has mutated, goes something like this: Facebook and other social platforms (but mostly Facebook) have taken away the power of the “destination” publication. Buzzfeed, having noted this a few years back, has built a stateless organization that attempts to optimize the delivery of its traffic wherever the audience may be: on Facebook, on YouTube, on YouTube on Facebook. Gawker, feeling threatened by Facebook, attempted to build another Facebook. (Oops!) A noble goal, vis a vis the loss of independence or influence a media organization has over its own audience, but one that — even with a brilliant design and flawless technical execution — had a slim chance of success to begin with.

And it goes on. It’s very interesting. Did you know that Jezebel was sort of for sale, sort of, at one point? Me neither. Can’t wait to see how Denton responds! (Update: here.)

Anyway: Employees on both sides of the vote could point to this comment and yell, “SEE???” (Dev employees could also point at everyone and fairly yell, “WELL FUCK YOU TOO.”) But it’s most interesting for the way it reframes the discussion about unionization as one about who is going to do some specific and inevitable firing when it comes time to either trim fat or to dramatically reconfigure the entire business model to suit an internet that daily inches closer to rejecting it.

It also casts Denton’s amicability in a slightly different light:

@hamiltonnolan I’ll get all German on you. Co-determination. Share the revenues transparently; share the responsibility. It can work.

— Nick Denton (@nicknotned) June 4, 2015

Let’s say you’re the head of a large and well-staffed internet company and you sense that the tides are changing. You have a plan, you think, to survive or even thrive, but understand that the near future may turn out to be painful. You are also very nervous about some pending lawsuits. You’d probably prefer to be able to hire and fire without any friction, but you can also recognize the appeal of handing over a spreadsheet of alarming numbers to a newly appointed union leadership, blaming Facebook or a large settlement or the inertia of your very expensive move, all of which may become pressing issues at the same time, and saying, “you help deal with this.”

Image: A 2003 mockup of the original concept for “Kinja” Headline by the genius Rebecca Frank.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Palinode

I’m sorry I was such a freaky witch.
And cut my face. I’m sorry belly shirts
to the dissection.
Little legs uncrossed at spiders,
the Are we getting our mothers
stuck on? to sorry.
A certain red shirt. I was roots
of moss blonde.
Sorry pink and black capped
the party, sorry learning by choking
to swallow. Stomp stomp,
I went in boots. Dude said he’d loot
my sorry neck.
Through the window
I was bent but just. Light on camel
light; apartments of lip and snarly.
I’m sorry my safety pin slip.
Sorry, stairwell.
I put my cut over the cheapo
flick fire.
Even peed in classrooms.
Sorries were flowers how I rose them:
It was the cat did this my hatred
love blood.
Sorry, cat.
I circled the fat in flame
sharpie, drew the sun about the thick,
even steed.
O sound: A net
my leg rubbed soft was sorry,
I’m running that sorry to the wound

Anne Marie Rooney is the author of Spitshine (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2012), as well as two chapbooks. A co-founder of Line Assembly, she currently lives in New Orleans, where she works as a teaching artist.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

As terrible as everything is — and I think, at this point, you have all arrived at a place where you can grudgingly concede that my frequently-stated assertion about everything being terrible and only getting worse is not only correct but perhaps a bit generous to the current state of everything — life still offers up the occasional pleasant surprise (this is life’s sickest trick, because it keeps you briefly distracted and pretends there is a tiny bit of hope that things might be better which, let us once again all agree, there is not). This is one of them, so for a few moments this morning at least, let’s all act like it isn’t going to end badly. I mean, it is, that’s the only way it can, and it’ll probably be sooner than you think, but let’s kid ourselves that it won’t for a couple of minutes and enjoy.

★ Gray clouds gathered in a glare-y morning sky. A woman in shorts cut shorter than her buttocks walked a pit bull out the side door of the hotel and over to an aging red Pontiac. A mockingbird perched on a caution sign while some other bird sang out of view. A light rain was falling on the walk across the wide, curving pedestrian-unfriendly street from the Denny’s to the funeral parlor. In the middle of the service a blast of thunder shook the anodyne chapel space, the way no stone or brick church would shake. A downpour was strafing the parking lot after, pelting the limousine all the way to the cemetery, battering the Garden of Faith and the Garden of Serenity. Water poured out of a pipe, flooded the gutters. Rain drenched the black suits and black hats and black raincoats of the funeral-home staff as they labored up the steps with the casket. Inside the door of the mausoleum, cemetery staff warned about marble floors. Rain beaded on the casket. The officiant had audibly sprinkled it with holy water back at the chapel; he sprinkled it once more. The rain abated to a mere shower, then stopped. In a corner of a parking lot behind an abandoned Pier 1 store, the suit went back into the suitcase, suit and case both only slightly wet from flopping around the open hatch of the rental car. More clouds were coming, navy blue and smoke gray rolling up in appalling bulk behind a crow perched on a Popeye’s sign. Then new rain crashed down on the trellises outside the Olive Garden. The clouds swelled like risen dough, lumpy and dimpled where someone had started poking it down. On the narrow two-lane back road Google Maps was choosing to get to the airport, the right-hand lane was flooded all the way to the yellow line. The rental-car return workers were wearing slickers and storm pants in safety green. They suggested sheltering in the car till a ride to the terminal could be arranged. A housefly was sheltering there too. The gate clerk wouldn’t even talk about the Philadelphia flight, with the previous flight’s passengers still backed up at his desk. It rained. It stopped. Who cared. The plane was located, after some time, and boarded, after some more. A little brightness came through and shone in the sheeted water by the baggage handlers’ feet. The clouds seen from above were a loose weave, clumping and pulling apart. It took minutes to remember the specific old bedspread, 20 years ago, whose synthetic batting had clumped and pulled exactly that way. A pale blankness filled the window till the eyes lost focus and little hot white bursts of sparks bloomed on the retinas. It was still blank out, darker blank, when the wheels clunked into position to descend into Philadelphia. The rain falling there was different because it was much colder. The suitcase handle was wet when it arrived on the jetway. Dark clouds hastened the fall of night, the sun’s departure time as notional and unknowable as an airplane’s. Was it raining now? Was it not? At no particular time, the next plane was airborne, its lights strobing fuzzily on the clouds. The puddles of Newark were still, undisturbed by falling drops. The city air, up out of the subway, was clean and cool and rainless, though the gutters were too full for a roller bag and as the eye looked ahead to those gutters, the shoe soles skidded on the wet metal of the subway grate. A gust of wind threw down a splash of drops from a tree, where they’d been held in reserve for a passerby who might have missed out on the rain.

About a year ago, I sat down at my computer after a long day with my six-month-old baby. I hadn’t written anything besides a grocery list or an entry in my journal in a very long time. I wasn’t sure that I even remembered how, but, determined to try, I opened up TextEdit. “I just wanna do anything, literally ANYTHING other than think about the goddamned baby,” I said to myself. The page was blank, and so was my mind. I sat at the kitchen table, hating myself. “Why is motherhood so hard for me, and why does it seem like it’s so much easier for everyone else?” I asked, wallowing, a victim for just a minute. “I suck at being a mother AND I have no ideas anymore.”

I stared at the blank page for a while. When I started typing, it turned out that I did have ideas, and there were many of them. But they all had something to do with: you guessed it, the baby. The irony of trying to escape my baby by writing about…my baby has never been lost on me. But turning your own child into a mine for content is not without its potential pitfalls. Because I didn’t plan on writing about my daughter or my family — I vomited forth one piece, then two months later began to write weekly without really thinking about it — I formed no thoughts. I didn’t consult my husband or my daughter. I simply began, and then continued.

Before and immediately after Zelda was born, Josh and I were quite protective of her existence. Even texting a photo of her to her grandparents felt like a trespass. She didn’t feel like ours (and, in fact, she’s not; she hasn’t consented to anything). This is normal, I’m sure. Each new parent figures out on the job how to navigate the weird world of procreating plus the internet. Do you post photos on Instagram? Do you make your account private? Do you post them publicly on Facebook? When you share a photo on Instagram, for most of us, that share doesn’t travel too far, but the potential audience is actually everyone on the planet. There’s a slight — so slight — chance that your photo will strike a nerve, and suddenly your baby’s photo is famous, captioned, memed, or something worse. We didn’t want that. But I was less worried about it than my husband (probably because I have never reviewed an Apple product or an Android phone) and so I relented faster. And, truth be told, I was the one spending fourteen hours a day alone with her, so there wasn’t always a lot else to do besides… take photos of her and share them. Sharing photos of her — first in the various GroupMes created in her honor, then with my friends in Slack, then on Instagram (I toggled the privacy on and off and on and off, never able to make up my mind) — was a very direct connection. We could all agree on one thing, which was that Zelda is very cute. I was on the road to accepting the truth: My baby is Content.

Sharing a photo is almost a reflex these days; we share whatever we see around us, throwing off little tumbleweeds of moments. They are, on the one hand, the purest single unit of content. But to see a photo of someone, even if they share several a day, is to merely peek into a life that isn’t yours. These moments seem personal — and sometimes are — but they don’t really tell us much. They have no context. Writing about your baby and your family is another level of content.

When you begin to write in any manner that attempts self-reflection and honesty, you open a porthole into your life. Sure, you can still pick and choose what you say or don’t say, but writing is far more revealing than a moment captured in a photo. Reading back through these columns, I am tempted to say that I have more often exposed myself, rather than anyone else around me, but probably that’s just wishful thinking. I know that Josh is reading what I write, and though I haven’t asked him, my guess is that it’s given him a lot of insight into my experiences of the last year, many of which have been with him, but many without. Of Zelda’s four grandparents, as far as I know, just one has read anything I have written about her: my stepmother, who graciously “likes” every time I post an article on Facebook. I have aunts and uncles and cousins who are supportive and cheering me on (especially the youngest ones, who I assume are in the same wondrous, but also hellish reality of parenting along with me). Writing about yourself and your family is stressful, to start with, because you worry about people that you know reading what you have written. In that way, it diminishes and makes seem much less important one of the historically worst aspects of writing on the internet: the commenters.

Like motherhood itself, it is simultaneously wonderful and horrifying to expose yourself, your true feelings, about something so universal, so mundane, so every day. I get emails from strangers telling me they know what I mean about little details I’d almost left out. But there’s always a risk, when writing about something as hallowed as motherhood and your own experience of it, that you will offend. You will tell the truth, the one you experience, and it won’t reflect every other person’s experience. And on the internet, that is bad. Here in the content mine, it is best to try and reflect everyone and everything, simultaneously. We are all unique, and all the same. To suggest that my experience is less than stellar some days is “complaining;” to suggest that it is stellar on others is to boast needlessly. Deep in the parenting forums and almost wherever you have the nerve to glimpse, buried under the thin veneer of “supportiveness” is a monstrous subset of people lying in wait, to judge, to proclaim you an asshole. Even when you tell the truth, someone will call you a liar.

This headline is a lie, like everything on the internet: I can’t tell you how to turn your baby into content. I can only tell you that you should do it if you want to, and if you don’t mind, or — as in my case — relish being disliked sometimes. Babies are great content. My favorite Instagram accounts are ALL babies, and I know that I’m not alone. I read other writers daily on their joys and struggles with parenting. Babies are weird and funny and disgusting. They’re like chumboxes: You shouldn’t want to click because the thumbnail you see is revolting, but you simply can’t not.

Truthfully, though, I do not particularly enjoy the thought of her reading this in ten or fifteen years, and when I allow myself to imagine it, I like to think either that she’ll simply be embarrassed me, another uncool mom, or that the internet and by extension The Awl will have imploded. But I do like to think of Zelda in the fallout shelter utopia, eighty or ninety years from now, still youngish, with her own kids maybe, reading these blog posts to herself and laughing at me. I like to think she will know me better for it. I would give anything to have such a record of my mother’s experience of parenting. Oh well.

Last week, a flurry of texts between my father and I, mostly consisting of photos of Zelda’s hair, ended this way:

Dad: “You should write about Zelda.”
Me: “I am.”

“You wake up in the morning, put out cat food, painstakingly arrange the cat toys, and wait. When the cats come, they leave you a pile of dead things in exchange, as cats do. You, in turn, walk your basket of stinking fish to the market to buy more cat food and a cardboard box shaped like a car. No one drives cars anymore. You do not ask what happens to the fish you exchange for these cat toys, just like you do not ask what meat is in the thin soup they hand you, in its little cardboard bowl.”
 — The first thing you need to understand is that the cats have won.

On accident and as a prank and for kicks we went to see Entourage, the motion picture, last night, and holy smokes. You know how sometimes people are like “haha I loved Boxing Helena” or “Showgirls is actually genius” or “I have The Last Airbender on Blu-ray”? This is NOT ONE OF THOSE CASES.

Listen people, I saw Waterworld on opening weekend. I know about bad movies. And there is nothing, nothing, nothing that has ever been committed to film that is so utterly culturally, socially, linguistically, intellectually, morally and aesthetically demeaning as Entourage. I laughed four times but only one of those was at something actually funny. (Jeremy Piven, bless his commitment to commedia dell’arte, works his bizarre and unlikeable scalp off. TO WHAT END. Come back to Noyes Street, Jeremy Piven Jeremy Piven.) (Also I always laugh at Entourage’s anti-gay stuff, because it feels so real.) But, it’s worse than that.

The sole point of the movie is that women are disgusting sneaky tempestuous conniving rotten fuckbots from outer space who must be avoided and/or fooled at every turn.

The dark side of LA hasn’t gotten significant representation in a while. Recently it’s been all “ooh the startups of Venice!” and “will the last person to leave Brooklyn please turn off the lights” and “see you at Sqirl but early, before my Yogalates™”! But it’s still there, ask any actress, and here’s proof in the sad contractual offspring of a bitter divorcing director and his shitty product placements.

How bad is it? The movie is so rabidly sexist that it even becomes pro-gay by the end, which is crazy, but that’s how it goes. It’s bros before hos all the way down, even if the bro is the much-maligned homo. HOLLYWOOOOOD.

I cannot stress enough how much I am not kidding here. It’s so bad. It’s not even competently filmed! It’s not even competently LIT. (The audio is pretty okay though.) They make people look terrible and wrinkled. They shot Jon Favreau from below and to the side, making him look like a listing peach-colored ocean tanker. Inexplicable locations pile up! Pregnant women park their cars miles from their Lamaze classes. A friend drives by a friend walking down Wilshire towards Fairfax. NO ONE HAS EVER WALKED THOSE BLOCKS. (Yes this person in the Google street view is either homeless or getting in his or her car.)

That a few jokes escape from this filth-pie of smog and self-hatred is a weird script doctor miracle. What a town! Entourage makes Sex and the City 2 look like Inception (with more pubes).