A day in the life of a WNV content creator begins much the way I assume a day begins for good, wholesome people. We wake up, spend the majority of our day at our respective jobs trying to hide our crippling social insufficiencies and generally misanthropic attitudes, and then head home to begin our days in earnest. Warranty Now Void is a project that is pieced together in our spare time in an attempt to amuse ourselves and our friends, I can say with confidence that we often succeed on at least the first of those two goals. But how does it happen? Believe it or not there is, in fact, a system in place to help regulate what we create.
Step 1: Brainstorming
Almost everything that’s oozed from our collective psyche onto WNV has been conceived in a “Brainstorming Session.” Occasionally someone will go rogue and just ghost an article onto the site, but it’s the exception rather than the rule. Also it’s usually cwayne; he’s kind of a cowboy like that. By and large though, most ideas are bounced around the group a few times before one of two things happens:
-
Someone steps up and executes an idea that seems like it’s worth it.
-
We realize that it would be hard and/or time consuming to execute so we lock it away in the “ideas” list to “…definitely do later. Totally.”
These conversations take many forms. Sometimes it’s an AIM window. Sometimes it’s a text thread. Sometimes it’s a 2360 entry long list in an IRC channel entitled “Things Scawt Likes In His Butt.” Any time a dialogue is open there’s a pretty decent chance we’re kicking around our own shitty brand of humor, and that’s usually the jumping off point of the next weeks posts.
There are, of course, miscarriages as well as the occasional full-blown abortion along the way. As often as not, these discussions initiate, climax, and conclude while we are deeply under the influence of alcohol, a substance known to strip us of any remaining shreds of human decency we’ve managed to cling to. The raw ore mined from these conversations may be rich with gold, but there’s also gonna be a fair amount of weapons grade plutonium and ultrasnakes* in there. (I am not a miner, and my expertise in geology only goes so far as “ground location,” but I’m pretty sure that metaphor was spot on.)
*They have super powers from the plutonium.
Step 2: Dissection and First Draft
At conception, an idea is usually only partially formed and is in dire need of some structure. It may be only a string of words we find humorous when placed in close proximity (see also: “bitty shits”, “swingy bits”, “everybody’s sticky and nobody’s happy”), and require context in which to dwell. This is the first hurdle an idea has to pass before it can be executed. Many times, there just isn’t enough there to build on, and the idea is released back into the wild (where, like a puma that’s savored the sweet taste of human blood, it can do the most damage.) If a fully formed concept does manage to emerge, it must then be given a medium. If the joke lends itself to an article, the group will often commit a sort of “text bukkake” on Google Drive until a coherent-enough-for-our-low-low-standards document crawls screaming from its spawn-pod. Should a comic be more appropriate, somebody just fucking does it. Videos… we don’t actually know how those get made. Sometimes we just wake up naked in a public place with a V-CD next to us. Also, we’re often sticky.
Step 3: Final Vetting
99.9% of the time, the process is already over at this point. Everyone’s happy, so we throw it online and call it a day. Occasionally though, something goes… wrong. Sometimes the finished product comes out a little different than we’d expected, and is deemed unfit for posting and must be locked away, deep in the WNV vault, where its psychologically destructive powers can be studied by top men. Top. Men. The first post that met this fate (and that has since been lost forever) may or may not have been a Snakes on a Plane parody that involved Samuel L. Jackson as Adolf Hitler in “The Diary of Anne Frank 2: Jews in an Attic.”
Sorry about that. And about the future stuff.
Just… Sorry.