I was told by who I would consider a reliable source that BC Woods is Facebook friends with none other than Ryan Milliron. The enemy of MY enemy...
BC wrote up my favorite post on the RMMB. I was fucking gasping for air. BC had a hispanic stepfather who was a real cockass. He once saved up all his spare change for MONTHS. Dude came in one day with a pal and they boiled up like 50 bucks worth of spare change. They then hopped in the car, sped over to the soup kitchen/homeless shelter. They dumped this scalding hot change on the ground and sat around laughing at the bums trying to pick it up. Reading this summary in my head makes me sound like the worst person in the world for laughing at it, but BC wrote it REALLY well. From what I can remember he also looked like Peter Griffin. If anyone has a link to that old story (or if BC's site is still up somewhere), please share.
Here is his website http://dunceuponatime.com/. But I don't think it has his posts from his writings on RMMB.
NOPE! Here it is! <a class="postlink" href="http://dunceuponatime.com/tales-of-ponape-the-most-freaking-primo-thing-ever" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://dunceuponatime.com/tales-of-pona ... thing-ever</a> This might have been the story that got him noticed. Shit. This is primo. Haven't read this in years.
I found the Cryptkeeper looking guy I was talking about... Michael Crook! http://boingboing.net/2006/11/01/eff-sues-michael-cro.html He would bait guys on Craigslist acting as a woman and post all the results on websites or sending to their supervisors. He also had the forsakethetroops.info website. I thoroughly enjoyed that one, because that guy was such an unabashed piece of dogshit....A few tried to wahoo his forums even though he only had 10 or so members. I remember joining his forum and to be approved, you had to write something about why you wanted to join and whether you believed in what his ideas, in essay form.
Not exactly, his raw material had a lot of potential, but he wasn't much of a writer. A lot of editorial time went into making his shit readable. Is why he went so fat down hill when he took his site to freak safari.
Yeah, they're pretty much just like this place. If you go over there and introduce yourself as a huge Tucker fan they'll be happy to talk to you.
Re: Tucker Max, retiring & moving on. Freak Safari is a sad, sad place. Each thread gets 4 or 5 replies from the same 4 people, and then it dies. I checked it out a long time ago just to see if it was any good, it wasn't, and time hasn't treated it well.
Agreed. Another thing that bugged me about the whole Rudius effect, as much as I believe in individualism and everyone's responsible for themselves, a lot of young folks like BC got led down the primrose path. For myself, I couldnt lead the Donikas and BCWoods with "this is gonna be great!" promises and live with myself when they fell through...especially while seeming to basically not get paid while doing honest work. Yes, go after your dreams and I'll encourage and support as much as possible, but when kids are dropping out of college and moving cross country to work, I dunno.....
Ok, do you realize that Tucker got paid NOTHING for YEARS while working on his own? He probably worked over five times harder than any of the other Rudius bloggers, had to edit his stuff on his own, had to code the website on his own and had no one to promote him. So he gives all of them editors for free, free web design, and an outlet to write with a NY Times best selling author promoting them... and he's the bad guy? Bitch please. On top of that he gave them about half the ad revenue and 100% INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY FOR ALL OF THEIR WRITING, even though HIS editors were the people that polished the work and HIS media company was publishing and promoting it. Look, I know they got paid absolute shit, like $20 for six months of writing, but they wanted to be writers, that's how internet blogging works, you get paid based on ad revenue, if you aren't bringing in ad revenue, you don't get paid. And if you don't like writing for the sake of writing and are just looking for a paycheck, don't do it. They had it WAY better than they would have without Tucker backing them. When did this happen? As far as I know the Donikas and Rudius bloggers of the world were living where they wanted to live, working their jobs and blogging/editing as a side hobby. Who dropped out of college or left their life behind because Tucker told them everything would come up roses after that? You could say Nils possibly, but I don't think Tucker ever promised him everything would be a cake walk after that, just the ability to work with him on certain projects.
How is this serious? What was the opportunity cost of them joining Rudius? For BC Woods maybe 2 jerks a day on his couch? Despite the failure of Rudius, if you wanted to be a writer it was a pretty fucking huge leg up of traffic. There are countless chumps with wordpress sites trying to crack writing with 10 hits a week. Rudius was taking your content and linking it directly off a NYT best selling writer. Any false expectations were purely the fault of the individual involved and ultimately, regardless of the demise of Rudius, their content wasn't good enough despite considerable exposure to get a book deal.
All I remember from that call out thread was that Tucker scanned his ID and posted it. After about ten post about his middle name he had to post, "Yes my middle name is Tibor, shut up you jackals it isn't the point!"
What kind of spiteful parents would give their son the middle name Tibor? Oh yeah, the same people who would name their kid Tucker.
Down boys! Frank, Toddus, what're you all in a huff about? A girl has an opinion and suddenly you're frothing at the mouth trying to tell her how horribly dumb she is. I don't understand your reactions to Nicole's post. You seem to jump to a lot of conclusions. Maybe Nicole can elaborate. Nicole, were you an editor for Rudius Media? Why weren't BC Woods et al getting paid? Were they not paid what was promised them? Were there several rudius media writers that dropped out of college because Rudia Media editors were encouraging them to? You imply a lot in your post but you didn't explain those implications. Maybe you can do that now.
Is there a joke I am missing here or are you fucking retarded? What part of her comment was an opinion? It was a false assumption of reality. Several rudius writers dropped out of college to blog on the internet? Sorry scrap my first question, you are in fact retarded. The guy provided website hosting, edited content and promoted it. For this ad revenue was split 50/50. They are fact. Sure his business model failed, you could argue the concept etc; however there is ZERO argument that any of the writers had better options.
I've read about ex-Rudius writers comlaining about being shanked professionally on RMMB. One writer said he wasn't paid anything for months, when he was it was below an insult, and when he wrote to Max, Max went took him to Tyraid Town saying he should be thankful Rudius would even give him the time of day. I don't know how factual that is. Personally, I don't know why people would get pussyhurt because they expect to paid by an internet site for their opinions. I sure as hell wouldn't have forked over one dime to Ryan Holiday. I didn't really sense a scrap between toddus and Frank, by the way.
I remember BC Woods saying that, and it was a load of bullshit. BC Woods just didn't attract enough traffic to make a lot of money. Internet ads don't pay much, especially if there's not that much traffic. He probably found that out once he left Rudius and started hosting his own stuff. I doubt there are many bloggers who can pay their own webhosting bills with their ad revenue, let alone make a profit. The real payoff from Rudius was the exposure; people like Philalawyer ended up getting book deals because of the exposure that RM gave to their writing (BC Woods is definitely not at Philalawyer's caliber. Not at all). I always thought that was how RM intended to make money as well - pay for webhosting, show the world some writers, and take a percentage of their eventual book deals. If they actually intended to make their money off of advertising, they were retarded.
Exactly. RM was meant as a platform to set writers up for other mediums. Anyone who thought they were getting paid big money from ad revenue on a blog misunderstood both internet economics and the point of creating a following. Advertising on the internet is notorious for being less successful per view because users are 'leaning forward', basically being active with what they're doing and purposely avoiding ads, while in other ads like radio or tv they're 'leaning back' and much more likely to give the ad attention. Long story short, you need a fuck ton of views to make money off ads on the internet (this is slightly less true with ads on streams and such). I remember the e-mail BC Woods sent. It was basically a whiny rant about what he was making per hour/per story. If morons thought they were going to get paid like other full time jobs when they were starting out their writing careers on RM it's not Tucker's fault they got let down.