This needs a bit of setup: One thing I usually like to do is talk about magazines I like and the infinite problems they create for me. Subscriptions in particular are the biggest irony about magazines, because they are simultaneously the best and worst thing about them.
WHY MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE THE BEST THING:
- They come right to your mailbox lickety split so you don't have to seek them out in stores.
- No one has leafed through it before you, so it's a cleanest best read.
- It saves you shitloads of money because magazines cost thousands of dollars if you buy them at a store.
WHY MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE A GODDAMN PAIN IN THE ASS:
- They sometimes come absurdly late, like a month or two after the thing already hit newsstands.
- They can get bent or crushed in your mailbox if your mail carrier or mail center people are absolute retards.
- On months when the magazine has three or four collector's covers, you don't get to choose your favorite. You just get sent a random one that, half the time, you hate.
To me, the bad here overwhelmingly outweighs the good. Also, consider the fact that when I moved from Orlando to Los Angeles, it took several months to even be able to reach Wizard and tell them I wanted to change my address. Maxim, for all their bullshit, at least had a simple website interface that allowed me to easily change my address and see when my subscription would run out. I sent Wizard desperate emails, left them angry voicemails, even applied for jobs at Wizard so I could mention on my cover letter that part of the reason I was applying was so that I could get the address changed on my subscription. Eventually, after I intimated in one of my emails that I would never again renew my subscription, some schmuck actually replied to me and said they would make the change. What the hell were they doing that whole time?
But getting the address changed was only the beginning of the fuck party they were preparing to have on my ass. You might be wondering about that aforementioned Maxim bullshit. Well, for some reason, once I moved, all my Maxim issues started coming late. One of them didn't even come at all until it arrived at the same time as the next issue, and that was only after I complained. The same thing happened to my roommate with his Entertainment Weekly. What is the deal with this? This wasn't a problem in Florida. Are the publishers delivering these shits on foot, starting with the east coast?
Another thing I hate about Maxim is that every year, they print an issue that comes with a special bonus magazine where they count down the Top 100 Hotties of that year. FHM does the same thing, and I think Stuff does Top 50 or something. I don't know what's going on with Stuff. Anyway, I loved reading these special inserts and cross-referencing the Maxim hotties with the FHM hotties to see which hottie was most universally admired (I believe in 2003, it was Jennifer Lopez). I would also try to incorporate Stuff, but because they only had 50, I would have to administer two different point-based systems, which would leave me with two different sets of results. I don't know if I'd bother with that today, or if they're still even doing only 50 over at Stuff. Fuck Stuff. Anyway, this Top 100 insert was not included in your magazine if you had a subscription. So if you loved Maxim so much that you bought a subscription, essentially committing yourself to reading every single issue that year, you were also condemning yourself to having to buy that entire one issue again at full store price just so you could read their shitty list of 100 skanks.
My subscriptions to Wizard and Maxim ran out recently and I didn't renew either. I can get my Wizards before they hit bookstores because the comic book stores get them extra early, so I just go there every month and pick out my favorite variant cover. And I don't even think I'll read Maxim anymore, because they never feature anyone good now. Their issues are usually filled with models I've never heard of, with only a few interesting articles. Maybe if they were still convincing my favorite celebrities to pose for whorish pictures, I might be slightly more interested. So when they sent me two or three envelopes telling me to renew my subscription, I tore them up into little pieces. My issues never arrived on time, but they were sure as shit prompt with those renewal envelopes.
Yesterday, I got a thing from Maxim saying, "WE WANT YOU BACK!" Under that, it said, "Let us win you back to Maxim with this last-ditch-get-it-for-almost-nothing deal. (Just don't make us beg.)" Nice punctuation, shitheads. On the back it says, "Okay. Renew my one-year subscription (12 hot issues) for only $11.97 -- a "we want you back" deal that saves me 80% and is like getting 9 Free Issues!" They also pulled out all the stops and put the Jamie Pressly cover on the reactivation sticker. They ALWAYS use this Jamie Pressly cover to advertise their magazine. In it, she's topless, covering her boobs with one arm and pointing at you while winking. This is the magazine equivalent of that cowboy that fired into the screen and scared the shit out of everybody in 1903's The Great Train Robbery. But I started thinking to myself that this didn't sound like such a bad deal. It kinda was like buying three issues and getting nine for free. I was also intrigued by the fact that they were making this sound like a really hot thing that no one else gets. So I checked their website to see what kind of sucker deal everyone else was being offered. And there it was. "U.S. 12 issues for $12.00."
THAT'S THE SAME FUCKING THING. WHAT ARE YOU SAVING ME WITH THIS SPECIAL "WE WANT YOU BACK" DEAL? THREE CENTS? FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOOUUUUUU!
I may buy a Maxim issue in the future at a store if it looks interesting. But besides that, I shan't be reading their shitty magazine that isn't even right about half the shit it says, especially in their movie reviews, ever again. Or maybe I'll get the subscription, if I feel like it. I guess I better decide soon though, so I can get the special deal that saves me three cents.
Then today, I got an email from Universal Orlando encouraging me to come out and apply for another job with them.
WHAT?!?!?!?!?!?!
(see my last entry)
And finally, someone got to the bottom of that Richard Jeni thing. It seems that, according to his family, he was diagnosed earlier this year with severe clinical depression coupled with bouts of psychotic paranoia. So the mental state that drove him to put a bullet in his head wasn't because of any kind of illness-- it WAS the illness. Another little thing I noticed is that all the websites now claim he was 49, not 45. That detail must have come forward when every person reporting on his death was forced to do research for the paragraph-long obituary at the end. In fact, if you were watching his Wikipedia page, there was no record of his birthdate until well after someone posted the date of his death. The page at one point actually said "(???? - March 10, 2007)." I don't like the fact that some people only get attention when they die. He was supposedly having a very prolific last few years, but I don't remember ever tuning into the news and hearing, "Richard Jeni still funny." Man. I would watch that news show.
Cheers,
Diego
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