One of the reasons this site has been a bit quiet recently has been that I was contacted by Cracked.com about writing some articles for them. I wrote one, and it’s now available on their site:

The 10 Most Tenuously Connected Movie Sequels.

I plan on writing more articles for Cracked.com. Whenever I do, I’ll post a link on this site, so if you are using the RSS feed you can be notified when a new Cracked article goes up.

When I was a kid, I had subscriptions to both Cracked and Mad, and I always viewed Cracked as a shitty rip-off of Mad. Their mascot was Sylvester Smythe, a janitor on something. Alfred E. Neuman could have kicked his ass. Mad had all the great cartoonists, and Cracked just got the rejects.

Then, as the years went by, it became increasingly obvious that magazines were a dying medium. Both magazines had to figure out what they were going to do to survive.

Mad became MadTV, deciding to make the jump to television, another dying medium (though they still publish a magazine that nobody reads). Cracked took to the internet as Cracked.com, the thing that was killing the magazine industry in the first place.

MadTV sucks monkey dicks. In much the same way as Cracked was a shitty rip-off of Mad, MadTV is a shitty rip-off of SNL. MadTV basically said “hey, SNL sometimes has skits that go on way too long, with characters that repeat annoying catchphrases over and over again in a vain attempt to make you think you’re watching comedy – we should do that!” Apparently, nobody explained to the MadTV producers that those skits on SNL are the ones that drag the show down, because every single MadTV sketch is a painful waste of time. The only purpose MadTV serves is to show everyone that, as bad as you think SNL has gotten since your favorite season, it could always be worse.

Cracked.com certainly has its ups and downs, but I run across Cracked articles on the front-page of Digg, Reddit, and del.icio.us all the time. The Cracked.com logo looks like it was made in MS Paint, but a lot of the articles on the site have actually made me laugh, which is more than I can say for anything MadTV has ever done. It’s funny to see how the magazine I liked as a kid turned into unwatchable garbage on TV, while the magazine I hated as a kid turned into something significantly more enjoyable on the internet.

It’s been a blast writing for Cracked.com. Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to write for Mad magazine, so this is pretty close. Anyway, send that link around, digg it, etc.