A regular posting schedule

Idea: Set your next blog update at some arbitrary point in time with the assumption that you'll hash out the details for future posts within that time period. (For our purposes, let's say the next update was scheduled to arrive within a week of the previous post.) Decide that this schedule can be met on a regular basis and explain in the site's mission statement that readers can expect new content soon. Fail miserably.


How It Works: Well, Ted wrote our mission statement (and it was a glorious mission statement, ranking up there with Google's "Don't be evil" and the core tenets of Manifest Destiny) back at the beginning of the month, with the assumption that we would get together to discuss the next round of posts.

This never happened.

It was then proposed that we would check around to see if anybody else had some terrible ideas to write about (and seeing as the people we associate with are just as ambitious yet generally useless as we are, this should not have been hard.) We would then have a teleconference to figure out what order we should address our terrible ideas.

This, too, never happened.

It's at this point that I tried linking an auto-posting feed to another blog I write. These posts accidentally wound up on Our Proposed Failures, at which point I realized we had failed to provide the content we had promised. I decided I should let Ted know so we could come up with a quick plan and start banging out posts.

But then, instead I just decided to type this out before I go to the gym.

You take what you can get sometimes.

Why It's a Terrible Idea: Well, seeing as we made a promise before we really planned it out, I'm not sure how we were going to stick to the weekly posting schedule. Maybe we can make the promise to you at a later date, once we have a better sense of a direction? I don't know. But it's generally a terrible idea to make promises you can't keep.

Despite knowing that, I've got about 5 blogs under my belt, each with fewer than a dozen posts on them. Ah well.

Let's see where this goes.

A Blog of Terrible Ideas

Idea: Create and maintain a blog documenting all of our worst impulses, harebrained schemes, and jokes taken too far. Provide a proof of concept for each, so that we may be continually reminded that we are, at bottom, failures. Try to learn a lesson from our failures. Fail to learn anything. Try to turn our failure at success into a success at failure. Fail at this too. Try not to get too meta. Fail. Fail again for good measure.


How It Works: Here we are, each approximately a quarter of a century old, and we can safely say that we have accomplished nothing. I know I speak for everyone here at Our Proposed Failures when I say that we lead lives of aimlessness, meaninglessness, and uselessness, seemingly undaunted by the weight of our near-infinite supply of unrealized dreams. We are shiftless youths, and getting older by the day. How can we, such lazy, unambitious monsters, stand to live with ourselves? We are terrible, terrible people.

Well, we're Idea Men, of course. That's part of it. Not men of action, maybe, but men of imagination, men of inspiration. That role has a certain charm, and nobility, and in the end it's just as important, or more important, even, than the role of those who get things done but without our vision. It has value.

Here's the thing: No, it doesn't. It means we're slackers and daydreamers, and that's it. We know that.

And somehow, absurdly, by not acting on any of our ideas, we are able to go on believing, at least on some level, that we're geniuses. I'm going to state something really obvious here, if only to remind myself, so bear with me: Being unable to take even the first steps toward accomplishing your idea is pretty much proof of a lack of practical genius.

Besides which, the ideas themselves are bad. Really bad. Look at this one; who in their right mind would ever want to read a blog of terrible ideas? It doesn't even make any sense! It may be our WORST idea!

So, the plan is to post, every week, another proposal of an awful idea. We'll link to a space where you can see a rudimentary attempt at that idea, and you can watch as the sheer stupidity of the thing catches up with us, week after week. We'll keep a running list of our terrible ideas, and maybe in torturing ourselves with our failures we will come to accept that we are not special and our ideas are not unappreciated or misunderstood, but just plain bad. We should be ashamed of ourselves.

But the biggest failure will be the blog itself. It is the failure machine, that can bring only pain into the world. It is our first Proposed Failure.

It's our best worst idea.


Why It's a Terrible Idea: Well, on this one I'm gonna have to cop out and say you should check back every week to find out.