goodbyes and/or hellos

[extremely "some personal news" voice]

Today is my last day at Uproxx. 

Actually, no. That’s not exactly right. April 2 is my last official day at Uproxx but I’m going to cruise through from now until the end of the month with unused vacation days. The story is the same one you’ve heard 100 times. The site was sold a few weeks ago and some things got shuffled around in the sale and part of that shuffling resulted in me getting shuffled out. So I’ll just be over here watching basketball and eating junk food and basically behaving like a teenager who woke up and discovered he has a snow day for the next week or two. This is something I’m actually very good at. Maybe that can be my next job. If you know anyone who’s hiring for that, hit me up.

I don’t want to be too cute about this. It is a bummer. I enjoyed my time there a bunch. I met coworkers who became friends and remained friends even after we stopped working together. I have friends who still work there now. I got to do a bunch of cool stuff, like ask Walton Goggins about Dairy Queen and ask Henry Winkler about the fish pictures he posts and rank the Mission: Impossible movies and write about the golden toilet heist. I lost my mind about commercials. I wrote about Hollywood needing to have more cool characters who use wheelchairs, which is important to me because I also use a wheelchair. One time I convinced my editor to let me do like 2500 words about a movie from Korea where a circus gorilla becomes a dinger-smashing professional baseball player. The GIFs I posted in that one got garbled by redesigns in the 10 years since I wrote it but here's my favorite, just to give you an idea of how brilliant this movie is. 

My short-term plan here is to take a few weeks to just kind of chill and decompress and brainstorm and take care of some life stuff that's been on the back burner for too long. I’ll still be doing the newsletter on Sundays. I might post some other things here, too, if I get bored or get a goofy idea I can’t shake. And if you want those in your inbox, buddy, there has never been a better time to subscribe or upgrade. Which you can do riiiiiiiiiight here.

Beyond that… I really don’t know! It’s not like any of this has been part of a single coherent plan anyway. I went to college to be a film major and failed out in nine months with a much better attendance record at house parties than classes. I went back to college a few years later and fell from a loft and mangled my spinal cord real good. Two years after that I went back again and got my degree. I applied to law school on a whim and got in. I got bored in law school and started commenting on some blogs. I got invited to write for a few of those blogs. I took the bar exam and passed it and realized I uhhhhhhh didn’t love the life I was staring down so I kept writing for the blogs. It turned into a full-time job. I did a podcast with Alan Sepinwall for like 60 episodes, which is crazy because reading his blog while I was bored in law school was one of the things that made me want to write in the first place. It’s been kind of wild now that I sit back and think about it all. Life is weird and problems come in all shapes and sizes but the universal thing about problems is that they are only problems until you figure them out. So that’s what I’ll be working on next.

In the meantime, I’ll be here and in the other usual places. I am extremely easy to reach. My DMs on Twitter are open and replies to the emails that come with this newsletter go straight to my personal account. If you work at a website or publication and want me to work with you, or if you have a fun idea you think I’d be useful with, or if you just wanna say hi, feel free to give me a shout.

That’s enough bummer chat. I promise I will not still be writing about this like six months from now. We are still going to have fun around here. To quote one of our nation’s greatest philosophers…

Wait, shit.

That’s the wrong screencap of Agent Doug from McMillions.

Sorry.

Hold on...

Okay, there we go.