So, it seems I’ve been neglecting the main reason I started this Tumblr blog – shamelessly promoting my shit. Ever since I left Holy Taco I’ve been writing articles for a site called Man Cave Daily, which is run by Cracked columnist and all-around funny/nice guy Brendan McGinley. I write a couple feature-length articles a week for MCD, a few of which run every month. I’ve even been elevated to the status of columnist, with a snazzy banner image forthcoming. It’s a fun job, and I have a lot of freedom to write pretty much whatever I want.
For no reason whatsoever, I’ve stopped posting the articles I write for other sites here. I think I became so caught up with trying to create original content for this Tumblr thing that posting stuff from somewhere else started to feel cheap. The thing is, I am cheap; I am a shameless self-promoter, I just don’t want to admit it.
The posts on here have been infrequent, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t had articles being published.
Today being Election Day, I’ve got two Election-based articles. One is a Cracked Quick Fix titled The 6 Most Baffling Trends in 2012 Election Propaganda, and I like it a lot. Read it and share it. I want this one to be huge.
I wrote an article back in June that got no love, probably because MCD didn’t has a strong a following as it does now. We’re not breaking any barriers, traffic wise, but we actually have people coming to the site regularly now, which is nice. Anyway, the original article, Five Life Lessons Learned from GIFs, is one of my favorites so far for MCD, and today’s article, its sequel, 5 More Life Lessons Learned From GIFs, is probably better, in my totally biased opinion. I hope to write a 3rd in the series to round out the trilogy. These are too much fun to write.
Read them both if you haven’t already. Hope you like them. And if you do, give'em a Facebook Like, maybe a tweet, and pass it along to someone else.
I wrote this one about 2 months ago, but it got lost in the shuffle. My editor and I both assumed it had already been published. We were wrong, and we be dumb and shit. Anyway, read it, and play some of the games on the list. A few might be pretentious as hell, but fun, original experiences nonetheless.
Remember me? I’m Luis. This is my Tumblr. I’ve been ignoring this thing lately. I got busy trying to not be painfully and depressingly broke all the time. Also, my girlfriend and I have been spending a lot of time together, to the point that we might as well move in but neither of us has the money for that. So when I’m not writing for money I’m spending time with the girl that makes me forget I’m so painfully and depressingly broke.
Yesterday I posted my first original Tumblr-only thing in a while. It’s below this post if you’re reading this on the main page. It’s not much; just some silliness I wrote as a distraction from another thing I was writing (for money).
I haven’t checked when I last posted links to some of my paid writing work but here are some notable articles and essays of mine that have recently been published.
I’ve been pretty focused on Cracked.com stuff; specifically with Quick Fixes. By my probably flawed calculations, there have been 229 Quick Fix articles since the format went live on May 26th, 2012. Eleven of those are mine. Assuming I know how to do basic math – which I know I cannot, but I’m trying – that means 4.8% of all published Quick Fix articles were written by me. I don’t know if that’s a good number. I don’t even know what that means. I don’t know why I took the time to calculate any of that. What a waste of time. But since I did, I’m going to work my ass off to ensure I get to a full 5% soon. And seeing as I don’t have a degree in astrophysics, I am unqualified figure out how many articles I need to write versus when I need to write them by to reach that goal. If I could do that math I’d be working at NASA and figuring out everyone’s tip at every restaurant I go to just to show off. (Side Note: Tip calculators on phones are amazing).
In addition to all that, I’ve been doing some side work for Maxim magazine. Yes, that Maxim magazine. The one with the mostly naked ladies on the cover and on every page. Obviously, I can’t link to my work because you can’t link to paper yet, but I can tell you that if you want to read my words in print you should buy yourself a copy of every issue of Maxim in the coming months, starting with the upcoming January/February issue, which will be the first issue my words appear in. Honestly, I don’t even know if I’ll be credited, but the work is fun and the pay is crazy compared to everything else I do. My contributions will be short and featured in the first 10-15 pages of each issue, in a section called Circus Maximus, which is kind of a catch-all of weird and fun facts, trivia, and news bits. I’ll post scans of my sections, assuming I don’t forget to buy a copy for myself, which is entirely likely.
And that’s pretty much it. You’re all caught up with my professional life and a tiny bit with my personal life. As the title of this post suggests, I’m still here. I haven’t abandoned this Tumblr. I hope to post more original stuff soon. I have a tiny web comic project I’ve been working on with the guy who DMs the D&D campaign I’m in. I’ll probably post some of those at some point. And I’ll try to remember to promote any new articles of mine on here as soon as they’re published.
I’m a pretty big deal here on the internet. As such, I understand that many of you would like to get to know me better over some light phone sex and sexting. Or maybe you want to give me a writing job. Whatever. Contacting someone can be scary in this brave new world of ours, what with so many people walking around, all with their own unique communications preferences. Luckily for you, the person wanting to contact me, I have provided all of my personal contact info below.
You can follow me on Twitter at Twitter.com/Luis_Prada
My home phone number is (548) 445-48557
My mother’s cell phone number is (328) 348-56451
If you would like to contact me through non-verbal communication, roll your eyes and turn a cold shoulder and my inherent need to be loved by everyone will compel me to respond.
I can also be contacted via a series of arrogant finger snaps that grab my attention/make me think you’re a prick because you think I’m a dog.
If you blow in to a large conch shell, I shall respond. I’m A-Sharp. Don’t blow a B-flat – that’s Aquaman’s note.
I can also be reached by setting ablaze the many oil-soaked braziers that I have strategically placed along the jagged spine of the Rocky Mountains, down through the desert plains of New Mexico, through the vast expanses of Texas, and through the swampy marshes of Louisiana before finally touching down on the sandy beaches of Miami, Florida.
If Morse code is more your speed, I got you covered. Just point your beacon toward latitude 25°47′16″N and longitude 80°13′27″W and flash this:
-.– — –..– –. . - .- - – . –..– -.. .- .– –.
If you’re more of a semaphore person, simply wave your flags like so…
When I was in elementary school, every day my class went through the same routine. We started with some light warm ups – leg stretches, jumping jacks, and the like. Then, phase two – a lap around what we unimaginatively called “The Big Field,” aka the bigger of the two playgrounds on school grounds. Finally, we played whatever sport our P.E. coach had planned for us.
It was around this time that the only bully I’ve ever had the misfortune of dealing with made my school days a constant torment. Even worse, this bully was a she – Lina Hill. Lina sat beside me in class and hated me from the moment she first laid eyes on me. Every day was filled with ridicule and random, verbally abusive outbursts about how dumb I was. Lina was my nemesis. Having been raised by my mother alone, I was taught to respect women, no matter what. So, I never fought in any way. I just took her punishment over and over again. The bullying got so bad that by the mid-way point of the year I was regularly feigning illnesses just so I wouldn’t have to show up to class and sit next to her. Some days it worked; most days it failed.
One day, during P.E., our class did our warm ups and the coach gave us the hand single that acted as our starting pistol – an almost dismissive fling of the finger to nowhere in particular. It was time to run. My elementary school was located on the corner of a busy intersection. The only thing that separated school grounds and an always busy street was a large chain linked fence. Next was a small strip of grass, which abruptly transitioned in to the black concrete of the basketball court. With the coach’s hand gesture, we were off to the races, each of us dying to complete the arduous lap so we could get to the meat of P.E., the sport of the day. (It was probably kickball. It was almost always kickball). I’ve never been to Pamplona, but I’m willing to bet all of what little money I have that my elementary school class running that lap was just as, if not more, intense than the running of the bulls – especially for the first few, chaotic moments. We huddled together in a large, amorphous mass, like helicopter footage of cyclists forming a peloton. Everyone jockeyed for prime position to achieve the glory of making it back to the basketball court first. After only a few steps, a classmate accidentally clipped the back of my shoe and I tumbled to the ground, rolling like Schwarzenegger in T2 after the tanker he’s riding slams to a halt in the refinery. When I opened my eyes, I found I was on my back, staring up at the sun which was partially blocked by my friends. I immediately noticed I was bleeding profusely from the right elbow and knee. Classmates lifted me off the ground, and within ten minutes I was patched up. I was a wreck, but I got a day off from P.E. for my troubles. But that’s not all I was rewarded with.
Lina and her friends were notorious P.E. deniers. While the rest of us played our games, she and her gang of female ruffians relaxed in the shade, exchanging gossip, making fun of the rest of us, and occasionally acting like cheerleaders for the most athletic (and most popular) kids on the playground. Due to my injury, I had to take it easy for the rest of the day – Coach’s orders. So, I sat with Lina and her friends. I was scared, at first. After all, she was my nemesis. In a couple short decades we would do battle atop a mountain as lightning clashed and the balance of good and evil on earth was at stake…or so I had hyped our rivalry in my head. I sat down on a double sided metal bench under a pavilion; on the other side, Lina and her gang. After a couple of minutes, Lina swung around and asked me if I was okay. Then, the rest of her gang inquired as well. It was a weird feeling, suddenly being the center of Lina’s attention, but they were all genuinely concerned and…oddly comforting. Lina was being nice to me! Instead of her usual grimace, she was smiling. It wasn’t long before Lina and her friends were attempting to braid the flowing blonde locks of hair I had cut in to a horrendous mushroom. The girls laughed and chatted as I became their Barbie for the day.
Lina and I never dated or got married or anything like that. This isn’t that kind of story. But every day after that, things weren’t so bad with Lina. In fact, years later, in high school, she came to my aid on a couple of occasions during an earth science class when a friend of mine with bully tendencies had his bullying efforts shot down gloriously by Lina’s temper and big mouth – a mouth that was legendary for firing off some rather imaginative profanity.
For the years to come after my P.E. tumble, I had a strange scar on my elbow, coupled with an even stranger bump. If I rested my weight on my right arm, the bump would push the scar in a way that made it look like I had a superfluous belly button on my arm. It’s not the best thing to have when you’re a self-conscious teen. Every time I paid my pediatrician a visit, my mom made a point to tell the doc about the bump. He’d examine it for a second, squinting his eyes, pretending like he knew what he was talking about; giving the ball a touch to further drive home the point. “It’s just a calcium build-up,” he would always say. “It’ll go away over time.” My mom never believed him.
Fast forward to middle school, seventh grade. The 6th period bell rang and I was late after having another annoying bout with my memory over the numbers that made up my locker combination. Luckily, my locker was only a few feet away from the door to my next class, so I wasn’t sweating it much. Unluckily, our lockers were about a foot and a quarter wide and tall – no doubt a cost cutting measure implemented to jam as many lockers in to a small amount of space as possible. As a result, our lockers weren’t like the ones in Bayside High. We didn’t have a full body locker. We had little metal cubes, some of which were anywhere between 5 to 6 feet off the ground. Mine was one such high locker. With my right hand I spun the dial of my lock, trying to get the white slit right on the mark, when a tall kid with apparently all of his worldly possessions in his book bag crashed in to my right arm, book bag first. I doubled over in pain as I felt a sudden sting. I retreated away from the class and in to the boy’s room. I grabbed a fistful of brown paper towels and dabbed some specks of blood from my forearm. Every time I dabbed the blood away, more blood would rise. It didn’t stop. I wasn’t bleeding buckets, but it worried me. I soldiered through the rest of the day until my mom came home at around six in the evening. I told my mom about the blood and she gave my arm a look-over. It was then that we discovered that the ball in my elbow wasn’t a ball anymore. It was still lumpy, but not it had a sharp point protruding from the top, poking itself out of my flesh. We were going to stop by the pediatrician’s office in the morning before school so he can have a look.
And look he did. For years this guy had been telling me this ball in my forearm was calcium; that after my roll on the basketball court my wound had never healed properly. This guy took one look at my elbow and said the most terrifying words I had ever heard up to that point: “Oh, yeah. There’s definitely something in there.” He walked out of the examination room and my mom turned to me with a slight hint of fear on her face. I say slight because the emotion that mostly dominated her face was self-satisfied mom-pride. “I knew it,” she whispered to me as the doctor left.
He came back with a small grey box that had some thin metal wires coming out of it that connected to a thin metal rod which looked like a dentist’s water pick. He twisted some dials on the grey box and then injected my elbow area with a local anesthetic. He picked up the metal rod and said something to the effect of “Don’t look at what I’m going to do.” I looked away, but the smell was worse than if I had been staring at it. Burnt hair and seared flesh is what I smelled. I couldn’t hold back my curiosity anymore, so I looked and I saw my skin being melted away in a perfect little circle. I was raised in a family of smokers, so I immediately thought of a cigarette burn on the fabric of a La-Z-Boy. I turned bone white. I wanted to pass out. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to do a lot of things, but when you’re a weak middle schooler and a fully grown adult male is burning a hole in you, there isn’t much you can do. I couldn’t feel anything in my arm, which was good, because if I could I would have felt the torment of the next phase of this impromptu operation – the tweezers. The doc had plunged a set of tweezers in to my elbow and I was certain I was going to hurl straight in to the hole he had just burned in to my arm. He fished around for a few seconds before finally sliding the tweezers back out. What he pulled out left his, my, and my mom’s mouth, hanging open – an inch-and-a-half long chunk of glass. Our best guess is that when I took my tumble on the playground four years prior, a piece of broken glass – maybe from a beer bottle tossed by a passing driver, or maybe from a car accident along the busy road – had stabbed its way in to me and had been living in my elbow ever since, only coaxed to the surface by the biggest, heaviest goddamn book bag in the world.
Today, I’m left with two scars on my right elbow (well, three; the third scar is a different, much less interesting story) – the first, the superfluous belly button, now about 3 ½ inches from my elbow; and the second, the cigarette burn the doc seared in to me to fish out the glass.
My named graced the front page of Cracked this weekend not once, but twice. The first, titled 5 Horrific Injuries People Didn’t Realize They Had was originally pitched as a regular length article, but worked better in a shorter form. The second one, and my favorite of the two, Al-Qaida’s No. 2: The Easiest Kill in Terrorism, is more along the lines of what I got used to writing at Funny Crave and Holy Taco over the past few years.
The version I originally pitched is the one that was eventually published on Cracked; the one you can read at the link above. A couple days after I pitched it, the Sandy Hook Elementary tragedy happened, and there was a consensus between me, Cracked editor Adam Brown, and Cracked Editor-in-Chief Jack O'Brien, that we should delay the article for a little bit because of the subject matter. We originally wanted the article go up just before the Homeland season finale.
In an effort to save the article from being about a subject people (myself most certainly included) were too depressed to think about in any way, Jack suggested I re-write the whole thing with a new angle centered around how TV writers have no idea how to write child characters.
I wrote it up, liked it a lot, and I submitted it. About a week later I got an IM from Adam. He tells me he finally started watching Homeland and that I’m absolutely right about how shitty that kid is. Neither he nor Jack had ever seen the show, so they didn’t understand the profound uselessness of that kid. So, Adam ran the original version of the article.
And now I present to you the second version. Read'em both and compare!
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Writers for TV dramas are all people who understand a character’s failing marriage better than they understand their own. If a character isn’t experiencing some profound level of adult-centric pain, sometimes it’s obvious they have no clue what to do with them. It’s apparent on a lot of dramas, but none moreso than on Homeland, which features one of the most poorly written kids on TV, Chris Brody, the son of the Marine-turned-terrorist Nick Brody.
As inept as he is, Carl from The Walking Dead has potential. He might do something interesting. Maybe he’ll do a backflip or something? Chris Brody’s thing is being so oblivious to all of the horrible shit his horrible family goes through (rampant infidelity, terrorism, dirty politics, murder, conspiracy, etc.) that he comes off as a delusional secret psycho who’s so good at repressing his emotions that he might one day transition into a different Showtime series.
Homeland’s writers have no idea how a 12-year old boy would react to troubling news, so they brush him aside. Sometimes by literally telling him to leave the room, or with Mike, the guy Chris’ mom is banging on the side. Here’s Mike running interference when mom and big sis need some privacy to talk about a homicide.
And here are the writers again throwing Mike at Chris like a towel over a vibrator when Grandma drops by. This time it’s when the Brody’s – who are all scared shitless – are placed in a lavish CIA safehouse.
The writers for The Walking Dead clearly had no idea what to do with Carl for a while, so they had him occasionally wander off so they didn’t have to make him do things. In Dexter, Dexter’s kids were an integral part of the show for years, until the writers realized they were getting in the way of all the ritual murdering; so they were shipped off to live with their grandparents. On Lost, Walt looked like he was going to be important, and then he was promptly kidnapped by smoke numbers and was rarely heard of again.
Writing children can be difficult, especially if most of your writing sessions involve talking about new ways the characters can fuck and murder this week. Writers often confuse innocence with stupidity, so they either write kids as oblivious or they over-compensate and make them borderline evil child geniuses.
There’s an incredible chance that some of Homeland’s writers have kids, just like the writers of The Walking Dead, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Dexter. Yet kids might as well be dogs the writers tie to a bike rack while the adults grab a latte, or worse, used as props to raise the stakes for the adults.
In the penultimate episode in Homeland’s second season, the Brody family reaches a boiling point. In one scene, all of their anxieties spill out and it’s impossible for any of them to escape from the truth anymore – they suck.
So Chris immediately storms away and starts playing video games.
You’ve probably turned to video games as a distraction from the harshness of life, but Chris’ version of it is so goddamn ridiculous you have to wonder if the writers gained their understanding of pre-teens by asking old people what they think of kids today.
If today’s TV drama writers made a show specifically about kids and how they deal with life, by the third episode we’d see all the kids evaporate into clouds and float away as an engine revved up in the background and the writers fled the scene.
I’ve written a lot of stuff for a lot of outlets. Here are my favorites; the ones that really show off what I’m capable of. I’ve added some context for a few of them. I’m looking for a full-time writing job. Does your video game need a writer? Hire me! Does your TV series writer’s room need a new writer? Hire me! Want to give me a book deal? Sign me up! Does your website need an editor/writer in a full-time salaried position? Hire me! You can DM me here, or find me on Twitter @Luis_Prada. My email is Luisrafaelprada@gmail.com.
Cracked - I wrote for Cracked on and off for over 15 years. Eventually, I became a columnist and a member of the columns editorial team. I wrote hundreds of articles and wrote a few video scripts.
3 Recipes For The Perfect Last Minute Mother’s Day Brunch - Don’t let the title mislead you. This was the first time Cracked let me write an article that was pure fiction disguised as a helpful, fact-based recipe article. If you like this, I have a whole podcast that’s basically this article in audio form. Links at the bottom of this post!
Bunny Ears - The site, which was owned and operated by actor Macaulay Culkin, gave me the chance to do something I’d wanted to do for years: get paid to write the silliest stuff I could imagine. The site was a satire of celebrity lifestyle sites like Goop but started sprinkling in some broader pop-cultural stuff toward the end.
The Inaudible Podcast Network - My time at Bunny Ears led to the development of a short recurring segment on the official Bunny Ears podcast called “Meditation Minute with Luis Prada”, a parody of guided meditation
podcasts and Youtube channels. When Bunny Ears closed down, I was able to keep Meditation Minute. I spun it into my own podcast. The Inaudible Podcast Network is an audio sketch comedy series about four podcasts on a fake podcast network. Those shows are Meditation Minute, Truest Crime (a true crime podcast hosted by two serial killers), The Feed (a food culture podcast), and Three Indistinguishable Guys Talking About Movies (a movie podcast). I’ve completed two seasons so far, totaling 80 episodes, 20 of each podcast. Here are direct links to my favorite episodes so far. But first, here’s a link to the Patreon!
I know 2017 was a rough year for many people across the world. That makes me all the more grateful that it was overall kind to me. I got engaged to the love of my life, finally started law school (after nearly seven years talking about it), and got to travel to almost a dozen new places. I made a lot of great news friends while fortunately still remaining with the same tried but true ones. I…
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