I had a new Cracked message

When I checked my mail this morning, I found a note saying that someone had left me a message on Cracked.com. His name was also Matt Blair, and he seemed like a nice enough fellow. I can only assume he found me because he’d been Googling himself, but that’s neither here nor there.

Truth be told, there isn’t much of me to see on Cracked. I’ve got a profile there that I’d forgotten about, and I’ve written all of three articles for them, the most recent of which was published over two years ago. I’d forgotten about them too, which is odd because they’ve probably been read by more people than anything else I’ve ever written.

The way it works when you write for a site like Cracked – or at least the way it worked a couple of years ago – is you pitch an idea and you hope they tell you to run with it. If they do, you send them a draft. They spend a little time reworking what you’ve written, and they publish it when they feel it’s ready. The problem is that you’re not involved in the rewrite, the finished product is often dramatically different from what you submitted, and you don’t get to read it until it’s been published. By that point, it might be stuffed with crude humour and a bunch of “retard” jokes you didn’t write, and it’s still got your name on it.

Granted, that isn’t as big a problem as it could be when you’ve got a name as common as mine. For all the average person knows, those articles could have been written by the Matt Blair who sent me a message this morning. Why, they could even have been written by this Matt Blair – but as I previously mentioned, he seems like way too nice a guy to score a bunch of cheap laughs at the expense of others.

But at the end of the day, it was my name, and as much as I appreciated the opportunity to write for a site like Cracked, I wasn’t very proud of the end result. The Wikipedia piece I mentioned above, and the one that came before, had very little in common with what I submitted. “Cracked Staff” got the lead credit for the latter because the bulk of it was written by someone else. I’m still pretty proud of this one, but even that was heavily rewritten. In the end, I decided it wasn’t worth the gamble.

Wow, what a self-absorbed rant about a bunch of people whose cheques I still went on to cash. The point is that I used to write for Cracked, I haven’t for a very long time, and I’d totally forgotten I had a profile and an inbox on their site until I got a new message this morning. Which is a shame, because I found a couple of other messages in there I hadn’t known about, and which have been sitting there unanswered for a year now.

One of the messages had come from an instructor at the International Academy of Design and Technology. He wanted to know if he could use the Wikipedia article as a teaching tool in a course on information literacy. The other message was from a dude who read the same article and got such a big kick out of all the Anna Kournikova pictures – again, not so much my idea – that he felt it was his duty to send me a few more photos of her.

It’s a real shame I never got in touch with that instructor, because I think it would have been really cool if something I’d written had been used to teach people how to critically engage with information and the media. On the other hand, wow! Photos of Anna Kournikova!

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