A Webcomic

Idea: Launch a webcomic. Get readers. Someday work full time on it.

How It Works: For us, we start by getting some hosting, a domain, and a means of designing our site. Then we try really, really hard to be funny, week after week, until the need to constantly construct jokes eats away at whatever we have that passes for a personality. We work together to write scripts which Greg will draw, and eventually post the comics on the site.

Eventually, we'd like to get some ads up, at least so the thing pays for itself. We're probably going to go with Project Wonderful ads for this project. Then, way down the line, we'd like to start selling merch.

For you, it works by visiting the site and reading the comic. You can do this in much the same way you would any traditional, or "print," comic. Instead of a newspaper, though, the comic will be posted on what's known as a "website."

Like many webcomics, this will be a Monday-Wednesday-Friday affair, so you can check then and expect new content three times a week. Ideally, the link from here will even tell you when it's updated, in case for some reason you check here more often than there.

The address is www.twostepsbackcomic.com. It launched November 1st, so you can go read it whenever you're ready. No rush.

Why It's a Terrible Idea: Did you know we had a comic in college that ran in the school newspaper? Most people don't. Which is why it doesn't really make sense to make this comic, based loosely on our lives, a spinoff of that one. But here we are.

Also, we lived together two years ago. That would have been the perfect time for a project like this, when we were a) living a life that we could chronicle in our comic, and b) in a position to work closely and collaboratively on something. It's been over a year since we've lived less than an hour apart, so the reality that the comic is going to be "based on" might not be one we'll all recognize. It will also be difficult for us to get together to work on it.

But we'll need to work on it a lot, and sometimes travel to visit one another. It would be really great if we didn't have real jobs filling our days, but, sadly, we do. The pathetic truth is that we work enough to make adding a webcomic to our routine the equivalent of canceling any social plans we might have, ever. So that's fun.

Under those conditions, it's hard to be funny. Really, though, are we all that funny to begin with? We're funny to ourselves, definitely. And to our close friends. But can we base a webcomic on that? Can we come up with halfway coherent jokes three times a week?

Finally, as always, there's the issue of regular updates. All I'll say is that you should check how often this blog updates, and also compare the date of this update to the comic's launch date. Suffice it to say, we're not so good at regular updates.

Actually, I think this project has more ways to fail than any we've yet undertaken. It's a new record!

An all-bass Latin Jazz band

Idea: Create a Latin-Jazz band composed solely of bass instruments.

How It Works: Well, you've got all these instruments, see? And a lot of them can play bass parts, but they're pretty different other than that.

You start with a call to action for people who love the sound of the bass and Latin Jazz. You wait for the calls to start pouring in.

You've got your bass guitar. Your double bass. A bass clarinet. A bass drum! Maybe a keyboard is hidden in there, with the "instrument" setting configured to "Bass" at the moment. (Someone might try to sneak in with a bass - as in the wide-mouthed bass, a fish you might come across in your travels - but that would just be silly.) You round out the whole thing with a vocalist who sings bass.

Then you combine all of these various explorations in bass-itude and start jamming out to your favorite Latin Jazz tune. Maybe some Tito Puente or something.

Why It's a Terrible Idea: Uh, I'm not even sure there is a bass part in most Latin Jazz pieces.

I'll be honest here: I'm not even sure what defines Latin Jazz as a genre. I hear the horns and the beat the upbeat tempo. I don't hear much bass, though.

(Can that many bassists even be in the same room without causing a bass-tastrophe?)

Then there's the fact that I neither know that many bass players, nor do I even know where to begin finding them.

Anybody out there play some form of bass?

Bad Ideas on Twitter

Idea: Set up Twitter accounts for all of the many Terrible Ideas we have throughout the day. These will be Our Proposed Failures for the reader on the go, allowing a window into our ridiculous thought processes in real time.

How It Works: Those two boxes on this site? The ones labeled "Greg's Bad Ideas" and "Ted's Bad Ideas"? That's where these tweets will go. We tweet them, you read them. If you're so inclined, you can follow us. On Twitter. I'm not sure if I have to explain how Twitter works, but I think you get it.

These tweeted proposals will be, of course, short. They won't require any explanation, so they won't get full posts. Most likely they'll never be put into effect, so you'll just have to imagine all the spectacular failures that would await us if we took all these ideas we have on a daily basis seriously.

We do, however, reserve the right to recycle any of them into full posts later on, if we feel we need a little more actual failure in our lives.

Why It's a Terrible Idea: I can't speak for Greg, but I can definitely say that I'm not the kind of person who's going to be good at keeping up with a Twitter account. Try this at home: look at the dates of all the posts on this blog up until now. Just a quick glance, there are only a few.

See that? That total lack of dedication to actually putting our thoughts into words on the internet? That's not good for a blog, but it's pretty much death on Twitter.

For argument's sake, though, let's imagine that having this convenient, text-messageable tool at our fingertips all the time will inspire regular updates. Do you think the stupid ideas that pop into my head all day are really worth reading? How many people do you think will?

My guess is I'll get 5 followers, Greg'll get 15, and that'll be that.

An Arrested Development Blog

Idea: Create a database of jokes related to running gags, recurring quotes, or even random references to Arrested Development. Don't run out of ideas. After running out of ideas, hopefully have generated enough interest in this idea that others will submit their ideas. Let others do our job for us.

How It Works: Let's say I thought of a pun or something. Maybe it was based on a line that was repeated as a running joke on Arrested Development. Perhaps it was the phrase, "I've made a huge Mystique," a play on the line, "I've made a huge mistake."

Now suppose Greg, too, had an idea to re-interpret something from our culture as having to do with Arrested Development. For argument's sake, let's just say it involved Tony Wonder and a line from the Aladdin song, "A Whole New World."

We would be at a loss for a reasonable medium with which to express these "jokes." Sure, if we were on a message board talking about Aladdin songs, or about X-Men villains, it might be funny. But even a forum about Arrested Development would feel like the wrong vehicle for this particular type of humor.

We would discuss our respective ideas, and at one point one of us would say, "you know what we should do?" And the other would respond, "Start a blog of our terrible ideas?" And then this site, this very site which you are now reading, would be born.

But ONE OF THOSE ideas would be this one: a blog for our stupid Arrested Development jokes, it would be called The Banana Stand and located at hugemystique.blogspot.com. A place for Arrested Development-themed humor that rightfully has no place in this world.

Just like all of our proposed failures here at Our Proposed Failures.

Why It's a Terrible Idea: Well, let's start with this: Arrested Development ended its run roughly four and a half years ago, so we're not exactly on the cutting edge of humor here. Most people are already familiar with this show and what makes it so great.

But even if it were a little more current, that wouldn't change the fact that the show's recurring jokes and callbacks are all funny within the context of the show. There is no sense at all in removing them from that context and trying to make them into jokes about unrelated things.

Honestly, who could the audience for this be? Fans of the show would be much happier to just watch the show itself, or even to read the wikipedia page about the show, than to see this. They might not even get all the references that the Arrested Development quotes will be applied to. If they do, will they laugh? I doubt it.

We would pitch this site as a place for people to look up an Arrested Development joke for use in a thread or a meme about something else, but is there really any demand for that? What are the odds we'd even have what visitors to the blog were looking for?

In theory, it would be best if it were itself some sort of thread, or anything that offered real participation. But for now it's just a blog, updated by the two of us, because we don't have any readers yet.

What are we even doing?

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.