GET THE WOKE DONE!
The Official Mudditors Meeting Minutes for 1/3/2022
As the lone note-taker this week it fell on BOFace
Don’t you love that title? Nice and boring — perfect for Medium.
We began our meeting without the stabilizing influence of the Dear Leader, our feared pirate captain, the notorious Susan Brearley. She caught some bug from an Airbnb guest. It seemed herself awaited the result of her COVID test, too busy feeling shitty to show up on Zoom. Rachael Ann Sand doesn’t trust the tests anymore. Rapid antigen tests are notorious for their inaccuracy and PCR test processing is backed up so far by the time you get the result who knows what TF is going on with you, COVID-wise?
BOF still can’t get anything out of Wix. He’s supposed to be working on the Web page for MuddyUm Comedy Camp 2022. Who puts a boomer on something involving tech anyway?
We thought, her video being off and her being muted, that Susan opened the Zoom meeting so we could meet in her absence, but no! She was spying on us. Soon after we began worrying aloud about how we were going to reserve our spot at Ashokan if BOF doesn’t hurry up and get off his ass, Susan showed up on screen sporting a scowl worthy of any school librarian. When BOF finished shitting himself she related how in the beginning she edited MuddyUm like the badass she is, single-handedly. As it grew she brought on two co-editors who, it turned out, didn’t like editing. Mudditors don’t get paid, so if a mudditor doesn’t like mudditing, that could be a problem. She kicked them out, which resulted in a flood of cease-and-desist letters. What?
Susan declined to say what a week at Ashokan cost, and pointed out that the ongoing pandemic could fuck it up anyway.
Quoting Samuel Johnson,
A Foolish Consistency Is The Hobgoblin Of Little Minds
Susan steered the conversation to the practice, much frowned upon by Medium but recommended by BOF, of taking an already published article and copy/pasting it into a new story for the purpose of goosing one’s stats.
BOF hastened to point out that he does not recommend it for that reason. Rather, to writers who submit days-old personally published stories to MuddyUm, as a way to ensure their story spends at least a few moments at the top of the MuddyPage.
Be that as it may, according to Susan, in the early days of the partner program this was a common way to game the system. Since Medium does not fancy printing the same regurgitated bullshit over and over they had to come down on this practice quite hard. How this squares with the current crop of self-help listicles and New Year’s resolution articles swamping Medium no one knows.
Following this Holly J See and Andrew Rodwin, who for some reason thinks he needs two Medium accounts, launched into their now weekly bitch-and-pitch session about Grammarly. “You are at the mercy of this horrible program!” Holly exclaimed, shaking with rage.
Hubby, Holly’s eponymous husband, had to ban Grammarly from their home. Holly promises she will seek therapy to overcome her Grammarly induced PTSD.
Following this everyone started plucking their eyebrows, except BOF, who doesn’t have any.
No one wants a unibrow. Did The Uni-bomber have a unibrow?
Gary Chapin started talking about how IQ scores keep increasing. He’s such an intellectual. No, seriously. How else is he teaching a graduate course in ethical assessment?
Not to be outdone, Susan started talking about Neurotribes, and how humor writers are all neuroatypical. Before we could get too smug about this, she began ranting about how the NSF is giving billions — with a b — to anyone doing research in neuroatypicality — is that a thing? — and told us how essential it was that we drop everything and read Mine, and how if we aren’t part of the solution, we were part of the problem.
Clearly we aren’t woke enough for her. Everyone was completely bummed out by the sudden realization that surveillance capitalism is coming to crush us all beneath its treads. BOF started crying, big baby that he is. Unfortunately Amy Sea was not there to comfort him.
Gary tried to lighten the mood by talking about Raymond Chandler, pointing out that none other than William Faulkner was the screenwriter for the movie adaptation of The Big Sleep.
Andrew had a face like a collapsed lung.
Susan started talking about how small Zoom groups foster trust, unlike larger groups where everybody has to take turns and proceed in an orderly manner and wasn’t it nice that the MuddyUm editor’s meeting was like the former? She then started quoting Brené Brown. Everybody felt much better.
BOF, having recovered himself, decided it was a good time to preclude the possibility of further bullying by leaving. He had some guy thing to do, rewiring an electrical outlet or something.
Lucia Siochi might have been there but she didn’t do or say anything that could be twisted into an amusing anecdote. If BOF, who is writing in the third person to mitigate his humiliation, forgot anyone else, he informs me that he truly regrets it if anyone is butt-hurt over anything he said or forgot to say.
Official disclaimer. Nothing in this article is intended to reflect actual facts, factual or otherwise. Do not use any part of this article to inform any of your decisions, decisive or otherwise.
