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.