Kyle, Nathan, and Ben.
Gross.
- The Moderator
My Top 8 Favorite Memories From My Time At Funny Or Die I Can Think Of Right Now, Off All Time
On 12/31/16 I ended my run at Funny Or Die. I started in 2008— so if my career was a human being, it would be a fourth grader by now. The company is merging the NY office into the LA office. I decided to stay in NY so I can continue to visit the statue of liberty and eat pretzels from street vendors. I got to work on so many fun projects in my time, but more than that I will remember my friends I fondly got to call co-workers. To wave goodbye, here are my top 8 favorite memories of shit I tried to pull, in no particular order.
MGMT Bathroom Note
In the soho office, we shared a floor with an architecture firm. For a week I left notes on the bathroom keypad saying the code has been changed, signed “- MGMT”. Our office was close enough to the bathroom where I would hear dudes frustratingly try the new code over and over.
The Gorge
I like creating holidays and traditions. Mostly because all holidays and traditions are absurd. Why not create more holidays and traditions to subvert the idea of holidays and traditions in the first place. But eventually you just get lost in the web of ironic holidays and traditions and become the very thing you were trying to fight. Welcome, to The Gorge. Get together on Thanksgiving Eve at a chain restaurant for lunch and eat as much as you possibly can and then eat more and then shove more food in that dumb fucking mouth of yours. It’s a celebration of American gluttony and chain restaurants. Some will say it is a strategy for Thanksgiving to stretch your stomach the day before so you can eat better on the big day— but don’t believe ‘em. It is just a mistake of an idea. A mistake we make, together. I created this holiday with Jason Flowers in 2014 at Outback Steakhouse in the Flatiron. We went hard and never looked back. By 2015 the entire office joined us for BBQ in Madison Square. And in 2016 after a furious vote in the office— we hit the Red Lobster in Times Square for a very special Gorge goodbye to NYC.
Animal Farm
We celebrated April 20th at the office by smoking a bunch of pot in the morning and trying to update the site as normal. The first year I had an animal petting farm come into the office in the afternoon as a surprise. It was incredible.
Sometimes We Dress Alike
In the beginning of the NY office, it was only 3 or 4 people. And we happened to have a similar style and… some days we’d dress alike. It was very noticeable when 2 out of the 4 people in the office look the same. From there spawned my favorite NY office runner: SometimesWeDressAlike.Tumblr.com. Run by a scandalous and anonymous moderator ala Gossip Girl, the blog tirelessly pointed out the obvious time and time again. It became so popular, that the moderator’s prickly fingers reached across the country to skewer the LA office as well. I hope this lives on.
Burning Undies
This one is simple and doesn’t make any sense. For months Ben had a pack of white underwear on his desk from a previous shoot. One day I took one out and started to light it on fire. It smelled terrible. Josh, our writer’s assistant and the office’s moral compass, would get so mad at me when I did it. Ben would then started yelling “DON’T BURN MY FORMAL UNDERS!”. I happened weekly. That’s it really.
Hallway Placard
In 2014 we moved offices and while getting it setup we had a paper sign on our door written in crayon (all the was around) with 608 on it so that deliveries knew where to go. In the first week, we got two formal complaints from tenants on our floor thinking we were making a mockery of the building with our sign. Hella basic. So we learned the official sign rules of the building were. Something like, “it must be made of metal and tastefully done.” We noticed most signs were only about 1’x1’. So to please us, our new neighbors, and the building,we had numbers metal numbers cut that were ~2.5’x6’ wide on our doors.
Cursor Prank
I learned this one from the Dev team. If you go into a mac’s System Preferences, in the Accessibility icon, you can resize the cursor. It is made for old people. But, it’s also fun to do to people when they leave their computer momentarily. All of a sudden, WHAM— your cursor is 8x a big. What fun. To get back at me for doing it to his computer, Daver kept his cursor big for ~6 months.
Stolen Identities
I ran a Jason Flowers twitter parody account called @realjasonflower. I ran it for months without Jason knowing. As more people in the office found out about it, they started to follow. Inevitably the fake Jason account showed up in real Jason’s “Who To Follow” and my cover was blown. I still run it.
Oh, another stolen identity was Matt Mayer. He sent out an office-wide email inviting people to a birthday brunch he was hosting at his place. I posed as Matt Mayer in the thread (with the ol’ CC a fake account into the thread on an earlier reply all trick) charging people money for the same event.
Well, that was fun to write. Lets end this run down memory lane with some original remix #content. My final minutes at Funny Or Die:
Hey, this was my 2016.
Above are a few of the photos that defined my year.
- Becoming an uncle. Wesley is a very cool kid.
- I moved in with Julia! We have an apartment together! There is a backyard to garden in and everything.
- Still reading books. I also started reading comic books. Preacher and Saga blew me away.
- I go to weekly classes to study Buddhism. Enjoying every part of learning and practicing.
- Fortunate Horse 3 happened. And it took all fucking year to make. It’s launching soon, thank god.
- I turned 30. It was a terrible day because I made it terrible. Everything is fine now.
- I went to New Orleans with Julia and I fell in love with the city. I need more NOLA.
- This was a pivotal moment. I got to ride on 3 different train rides this year. THREE! From LA to SD, from LA to SLO, and from WI to IL. Once it was with co-workers, once it was with friends, and once solo. And I enjoyed the hell out of it. The leg room. The width of the seats. The food and bar car. The nice conductors. The huge windows. The ease of getting on the train. The beautiful train stations. Everything about train life I love. If it were up to me, I would live on a train. (Plus I went on a ton of Metro North and LIRR trains. Still, great.)
- I left Funny Or Die after 9 solid years.
Not too shabby. I also wrote about my favorite podcasts and my favorite music on my other blog.
My Favorite Podcasts of 2016
So many ‘casts out there to pick from. So there is no way this list can be complete. But these episodes left an impression on me. (Favs from ‘15)
The Truth - Call Of Dating / Two stories: one turns dating into a video game, and the other is about a young girl’s preoccupation with a big prawn.
Don’t Get Me Started - Drew DiFonzo Marks: Buddhism / Actor, comedian, improviser Drew DiFonzo Marks talks to us about BUDDHISM. How it pulled him out of a huge depression, what of its principles spoke to him first, how he meditates, meditation retreats and the story of why he has a wagon wheel tattooed on his right forearm. We get into it!
WTF with Marc Maron - #700 Part 2 Louis CK / Then for Part 2, Marc’s friend Louis CK stops by to spill the beans on everything that went into making and releasing his series Horace and Pete.
Radiolab - Debatable / In competitive debate future presidents, supreme court justices, and titans of industry pummel each other with logic and rhetoric. But a couple years ago Ryan Wash, a queer, Black, first-generation college student from Kansas City, Missouri joined the debate team at Emporia State University. When he started going up against fast-talking, well-funded, “name-brand” teams, it was clear he wasn’t in Kansas anymore. So Ryan became the vanguard of a movement that made everything about debate debatable. In the end, he made himself a home in a strange and hostile land. Whether he was able to change what counts as rigorous academic argument … well, that’s still up for debate.
Dharma Punx - Understanding And Alleviating Dread / Living with dread.
The Axe Files - Van Jones / Van Jones, political activist and CNN commentator, talks with David about Tuesday’s election results and the cultural chasm that exists in America, his childhood in rural Tennessee and the important relationship he had with his father, and why he won’t be running for public office any time soon.
Love + Radio - Doing The No No / Adam Zaretsky is a bioartist who explores the manipulation of DNA, the fringes of genetic modification, and butts up against the ethical boundaries of science and beyond.
Start Up - Part 5: Suits / In 2007, Dov Charney took American Apparel public, placing the company under heightened scrutiny. This meant Charney lost the privacy and autonomy he’d grown accustomed to. And, as more stories emerged from inside the company, some began to reevaluate the man they’d chosen to work with.
There Goes The Neighborhood - Turf Wars / With his first rezoning plan, Mayor de Blasio has declared East New York the place where the city’s future begins. But what does East New York’s past look like?
Undone - Disco Demolition Night / One summer night in 1979, 50,000 people got together at a baseball stadium to kill disco. And it worked. Kind of. In this first episode of “Undone” we meet someone who worked as an usher at Disco Demolition Night and played a vital role in keeping the spirit of disco alive today.
Undone - The Deacons / This is a story about a forgotten part of civil-rights history that is still very much alive. In 1965, a group of black men in Louisiana called the Deacons for Defense and Justice took up arms against the Klan. Now a daughter of the Deacons wants to start a museum in their honor, but not everyone in town wants their story told.
You Made It Weird - Aaron Rodgers / Aaron Rodgers (Green Bay Packers quarterback! FORBs: Friends of Rob Bell series!) makes it weird!
You Made It Weird - Bo Burnham #3 / Bo Burnham (comedy!) makes it weird for a third time!
Reply All - The Cathedral / Amy and Ryan Green’s one-year-old son is diagnosed with cancer and begins an agonizing period of treatment. And then, one night in the hospital, Ryan has a strange epiphany: this whole terrible ordeal should be a video game.
Reply All - Stolen Valor / PJ dives into the world of military impostors and the vigilantes who hunt them. Plus, a dispatch from Dallas.
Reply All - Boy In Photo / Who was Wayne?
99% Invisible - Home On Lagrange / O’Neill wanted to build vast human settlements in space. And although he wasn’t the first to imagine humans living there, he was the first to come up with technologically feasible designs for habitats.
99% Invisible - Project Cybersyn / This “operations room” (or: opsroom) was the physical interface for a complex system called Cybersyn. It was an ambitious project in technology and design meant to help Chile’s socialist economy succeed.
99% Invisible - The Shift / In baseball, the solution for stopping the greatest hitter of all time was to actually redesign the game itself. And it started in the 1940s with Ted Williams.
99% Invisible - Soul City / By 1968 Carmichael and McKissick had begun to diverge about how to achieve black power. For Carmichael, capitalism was exploitative and part of the problem. For McKissick, capitalism could be part of the solution, with black-owned businesses paving the way for equality, freedom and justice.
99% Invisible - Separation Anxiety / Five nights a week, Taipei residents head to out to designated street corners, where the yellow garbage trucks will stop for a few minutes (and turn off their music), so that people toss their bags of trash in themselves. Despite the chaos that occasionally ensues when an entire street rushes toward the same vehicle, the collection system in place prior to this was far more unpleasant.
99% Invisible - The Giftschrank / The rights to Mein Kampf were given to the Bavarian government, which decided not to publish any new German editions, and worked to ensure the existing copies held by libraries were only used for scholarship, not politics. Fortunately, Germany had a centuries-old system in place for just such a nuanced approach: the Giftschrank.
99% Invisible - Yin And Yang Of Basketball / In 1891, a physical education teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts invented the game we would come to know as basketball. In setting the height of the baskets, he inadvertently created a design problem that would not be resolved for decades to come.
99% Invisible - The Blazer Experiment / Cizanckas wanted to rebuild trust with the community — and he made a number of changes to improve the department’s image. One of the most ground-breaking and controversial was the new blazer-style uniform he implemented.
I ran a blog called Sometimes We Dress Alike for when my co-workers dressed similarly. What a fun thing!
I did it for a third time! (One & Two)
It’s been 3 years since my last polaroid drop. RESPECT.
For all you loyal fans you’ll notice I did not keep using actual polaroid film. It is expensive and ya boi is on a budgettttt. So I got the fujifilm instax shiiiiit. Respect the budget, respect the game. Speaking of loyalty, shout out to Alan, Meredith, Casi, Mom, and Jerry for being the only people to span all 3 sessions. 🙏🏼
This time around I made little corners on the wall to help people frame themselves, and an X on the ground to get a constant shooting spot. Worked out pretty well.
Fun story: I know most everyone really well on that wall. All except 2. I used to AirBnB my apartment a lot and one time I came back to see two new photos on the wall. My guess is they saw the photos on the door and thought that was everyone who had stayed previously? Which is a great idea— a visual guestbook of sorts. Thought it was rad so I left them up.
Late night fun.
is this content?
she wanted the nose to line up.
i wanted the eyes to line up.
Hi, this was my 2015.
Above are a few of the photos that defined my year.
1. The weekend in Oregon that showed me how full my life can be.
2. I ran with the bulls in Spain, fulfilling a life goal. Powerful moment.
3. Watching two of my great friends get married. It was beautiful.
4. Going to Ireland with Mom!
5. Casi coming out to NY for PaellaDay. Cooking for friends. Huge.
6. Meeting Elliott! What a cool kid.
7. Meeting Julia! I feel in love! The best!
8. This was a pivotal moment. There was this fucking house fly buzzing around my apartment. Just going everywhere. And it was so loud. And so big! Like a horse fly? Easily bigger than a nickel. Anyway, I was tired of the bullshit and I took my destiny into my own hands. I took a dish towel and WHIPPED THE FLY IN MID AIR. And I hit it. And it shattered and split into multiple pieces. Each piece of the (RIP) fly was larger than a dime. I mean, wow. It was huge. I was in shock that I connected, let alone ripped it apart.
9. I had a beard and cut it… who cares.
So that was my year. It was great. Like, really great.
I also wrote about my favorite podcasts and my favorite music on my other blog. Lots of links await you.
Made a poster from sketches to print in >1 hour today.
Work photos be working.
finally found my voice in email form
if you’re in NYC this week come by for a sniff.
copycats