Gamer Girls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYRSjUDFLHw 

Here are parts 1 and 2:

https://gamergrrlsofficial.blogspot.com/2022/04/how-did-florida-man-save-christmas-newt.html

https://gamergrrlsofficial.blogspot.com/2022/04/how-did-florida-man-save-christmas-part.html

We should be able to finish this today unless Newt reveals that he created both AVGN and the Irate Gamer or something.

13:30 – “So after I was let go (FROM SCREENWAVE) and I was at my fucking lowest, I met with a producer friend of mine who was just like, ‘Look, ultimately, I was going to try to steal you away from that last job anyway to start re-booting Schlock and Awe so why don’t we go do this now'”.

What?  There was a producer…whatever that even means, I don’t know what a producer does, to be honest.  And this person was going to steal Newt from Screenwave so that Newt can work on Schlock and Awe, which is Newt’s own “production company.”  I don’t get it.  How can you steal somebody so that they can work at their own production company?  

I must be missing something.  So let’s imagine that this producer has a company and he’s saying that he wanted to poach Newt from Screenwave so that Newt can work at this producer’s company.  Why would anybody do that?  What has Newt done that makes him so desirable to the film industry?  He made one god awful “tits and gore” movie, on a budget of $5,000, that he made himself, that nobody has seen.  He was also working on Justin Silverman’s weird Youtube channels years ago, I think mostly in an off-camera capacity.  And then he did Talking About Tapes/Hack the Movies for a few months.

I know that he’s done behind the scenes stuff and he probably learned how to make Youtube videos.  Shit about cameras and audio and whatnot and that’s good.  I’m not diminishing the fact that Newt has learned stuff about making videos over the years.  But who really cares?  Why does that make him such a big shot in the film industry that people are trying to hire him away from other companies?

Anyway, Newt reveals that the Florida Man comic book is supposed to be like a calling card for the Florida Man movie.  So…if people like the comic book, they might be interested in the movie.  

I just can’t get over the fact that he’s putting so much faith into this Florida Man concept, everything hinges on Florida Man, he thinks that Florida Man is really good but then…he didn’t bother to give the character an original name.  

Let’s assume that Newt’s Florida Man is a genuinely great idea with a great story and everybody is going to love it.  The name is fucking terrible.  Aside from the fact that there are MANY existing comics that use the Florida Man name, and there’s a whole “meme” about Florida Man, which is the basis for the joke in this Florida Man comic, which are both MASSIVE problems, the name is just bad.  It’s stupid.  This doesn’t interest me.  Florida Man?  It’s boring.  

And then look at the design of the character.  Florida Man is some sort of superhero tits and gore bullshit.  He’s going to be fighting colourful enemies and doing wacky shit and having sex with the ladies.  Why not give him a cool costume?  Or make him an anthropomorphic goat?  Something.  Florida Man is just a big fat guy with a boring as fuck name.  

14:30 – “So I got together with Matt Cline, who is a comic book writer who I worked with on an anthology book called The Adventures of Sam Hayne: Trick and Treat and it was like a Scooby Doo/Batman kind of thing.”

Oh.  Another original idea by Newt “The Ideas Man” Wallen.  Scooby Doo with tits and gore.  That’s what we all want.

By the way, there are no Google results for this thing.  Google suggests it might be Samhain but there aren’t any results for that either.  So…did this ever get made?  At least it’s an original title.

15:30 – Newt is just naming random people who worked on…something…I don’t even know.  And he mentions that he went to one of these guy’s homes and cried about getting fired from Screenwave.  

Newt can’t seem to accept that he was rightly fired.  Maybe Newt had too much work, maybe Newt was underpaid, maybe it’s complete bullshit that James Rolfe can’t write his own film reviews, but Newt was the one who did the plagiarism.  He deserves to get fired for that.  If nothing else, just for how incredibly lazy it was.  

I’ve plagiarised many times in school but I didn’t just copy this shit verbatim.  I changed the words around.  And I was doing this before the internet so it was harder to catch plagiarism anyway.  I could have easily just copied everything verbatim from books or my Encarta CD and nobody would have been the wiser.  But I didn’t do that.  I went the extra step and changed some of the words.

Newt just went to that fucking blog, pressed control C, control V, and said, “I’m done.  Moving on.  Where’s Horseface?  I want to talk to Horseface.”

16:45 – “This is an idea, just like Planet Frankenstein, that it came out fully formed in my head.”

Yeah.  After reading these “memes” about Florida Man.  

17:00 – “This is the funniest, most creative thing I’ve ever written in my entire life.”

I don’t doubt it.  And, just like everything else you do, it’s ripping off wholesale from other people’s ideas and adding tits and gore.

“I’m very hard on myself and I don’t believe that I’m a writer.”

We can all agree with that.

“I’m an ideas man, as I was told at my last job.”

Yeah.  Other people’s ideas.  Newt is a curator of other people’s ideas.

17:30 – Newt is going to New Jersey Horror Con…or something…and will be selling 250 numbered issues of the “ashcan” version of this comic.  If you’re unfamiliar, “ashcan” comics were a scam that were perpetrated in the 1990s.  They were like pencilled, shitty versions of a comic and released in “limited” numbers in attempt to interest speculators.  None of these “ashcan” comics are worth any money today.

It’s based on an older concept where comic publishers would release a comic in very low print numbers of a title that they’re not particularly interested in but for copyright purposes, they had to release a comic of this title every few years or the copyright would lapse.  Something like that.  So they would just release a shitty version of this comic to keep the copyright going.  And these genuine ashcan comics, so-called because they belong in the ashcan/trashcan/rubbish bin are worth money today.

Anyway, then Newt is going to sell any of these 250 that don’t sell online.  

I’m trying to think if 250 was a good number to have printed.  I mean, it’s probably the minimum order.  And 250 isn’t that bad, I guess.  Even if he only sell, say, 50, he can still have 200 copies in his home and that wouldn’t take up that much space.  Especially since he sold his comic collection to fund this thing.  He presumably had more than 200 comics.

18:00 – Then he starts talking about the Kickstarter for the remaining 11 issues of this proposed series.  It has some amazing incentives, according to Newt.  I’m intrigued.  Tell me more, Newt.

Oh, he just moves on.  What would be some good incentives?  Maybe there’s a tier where Newt will write your research paper for school or college or whatever.  You see this shit.  You can pay people to write your research papers.  But Newt will just copy and paste the paper from Wikipedia or wherever.  Personalised plagiarism.  

“I’m so excited about this because you could tell stories about this character forever.”

Indeed.  They’ve been making “memes” about Florida Man since at least 2011.  And there’s that Florida Man comic that was released last year.  

18:30 – “All these little sight gags that I wanted, like on the map of Florida, there’s a line pointing to it and I wrote, ‘America’s dick'”

This is the sort of hilarity we can expect from Florida Man Saves Christmas.  Come on, Newt.  Don’t give away all of the best jokes.  

18:45 – “I just wanted to make this folk hero and do something that nobody else has done.”

https://floridamancomics.com/

By the way, here’s Mike Baron’s Florida Man Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/chrisbraly/florida-man-the-graphic-novel

Not to be confused with Newt Wallen’s Florida Man Kickstarter.  

There are 103 backers and he raised $2,789.  That’s from a professional comic book writer.  It says that he won multiple Eisner Awards.  That must be the comic book equivalent of the Oscar.

Only 103 people.  Less than $3,000 raised.  And his comic is 64 pages.  That’s a double-sized comic, in the industry.  Newt’s comic is only 24 pages or something.  So you get way more for your money with Mike Baron’s Florida Man.

Here’s the description of the comic:

Gary Duba’s having a bad day. There’s a snake in his toilet, a rabid raccoon in the yard, and his gal Krystal’s in jail for getting naked at a Waffle Castle and licking the manager. Gary is just a southern redneck living in a trailer down by the swamp, but he’s got dreams, big dreams. But it seems like every time he tries to get ahead, fate deals him a low blow.

Yeah.  

103 backers.  And that guy has 50 years of experience as a comic book writer.  I don’t know who the artist is but it looks like comic book art.  It appears to be in full colour.  Only 103 people were interested.

How many people are going to buy Newt’s comic?  I mean…it’s sad.  I don’t know what he was thinking.  If he’s just making a comic on a lark because he thinks it would be fun and something creative to do, fine.  But he thinks that he’s going to be able to quit his job over this.  It’s completely delusional.

The banner on my blog cost like $200.  Each character was $25 or something but there was a discount if you got more than one character.  There were also extra fees for props.  I don’t remember.  And I had two other characters (Pelvic Gamer and John Riggs) so it was 9 characters in total.  

Two hundred dollars for a banner for a blog that makes no money is stupid.  And nobody cares about the banner.  But when I look at it, it always brings me a little joy.  You have Ali making the “O” face, Erin struggling with a video game, and homoerotic Tony in his Aladdin outfit.  It’s funny.  So for me, it was worth the $200.

But I don’t plan on retiring off of the blog.  This banner wasn’t an investment.  Whatever.

18:45 – “I wanted to prove my worth a little bit as well, like, ‘Oh yeah, I actually have some okay ideas sometimes.”

Such as?

19:00 – “I hope that even the people who don’t talk to me are proud of me.”

He’s talking about Horseface, of course.  Do you suppose that Horseface cares AT ALL about Newt’s ridiculous projects?  I think that she pretended to give a fuck about any of this because Newt was putting her in these stupid projects.  I assume that she was getting paid something and she just likes the attention anyway.  But there’s no fucking way that she cares about this comic book, for example.  

“I had to change a lot of stuff to take out people who don’t work with me anymore.”

So Horseface was even in the comic?  Is that what he’s saying?  Unbelievable.

Yeah, that it what he was saying.  Crystal Quin was even in this fucking Florida Man comic book.

19:30 – “Even if the Kickstarter doesn’t work, I’m going to make something out of it.”

Well, Mike Baron wasn’t able to make it work.  What hope does Newt have?  

20:00 – “Maybe one day it will be a video game.  Maybe one day it will be a feature film.”

Florida Man.  It’s just…well, I think that I’ve covered my concerns about the project already.  Let’s move on.

20:45 – “I love cursing and boobs and slime and monsters and Southern fried shenanigans so that’s what Florida Man is.”

Well, I like…some of those things, anyway.  But that’s not a story.  These are just random elements.  

23:30 – “Hopefully we sell those 250 copies so that I feel good about myself for once.”

I don’t think that pity is a good sales tactic.  

And basing your self-worth on these get rich quick schemes is a terrible idea.  Why not focus on getting a fulfilling job or a girlfriend or a hobby?  

So that’s the video.  At least he was…somewhat…tempering his expectations.  For a brief time in this, he contemplated what would happen if the comic didn’t sell.  He was saying something like it would still be a success because it’s something that he wanted to do.  So fine.

– “I am sure you heard of the “Preston and Steve” radio show on WMMR. They on occasion run a segment called “Florida Man.” It consists of strange news stories that involve men from Florida. Always hilarious.”

Newt replies, “I listen to them on my drives to work.”

– “I’ve had this idea for years, about a daily show style news story involving Florida man. The police respond to a call about a man wrestling an alligator. Upon investigating the scene, they find out the gator is a pool toy, and the dude is tripping balls.”

It seems that a lot of people have had this Florida Man idea.  It’s a popular meme.  I guess.

– “This is awesome man. I live in Florida. I wish I could drive up to NJ horror con. Also I can’t wait for the comic to come out. Ps- thanks for the writing advice over on twitter. It really helped.”

I laughed out loud at this.

How come nobody ever approaches me for writing advice?  I’m not saying that I’m Tennessee Williams but I write well.  It’s funny.  It’s mostly grammatically correct.  There’s a clear voice.  I have a style.  Teachers and professors always told me that I write well.

I’m also a professional writer.  I wrote a few articles for a blog years ago and got paid.  That counts.  

And there’s the blog.  The blog is great.  Three years of daily, long-form, high-quality articles.  

My writing is much better than Newt’s.  Look at his Twitter.  It’s full of spelling and grammar errors and he’s never written anything interesting on there.

I should run a writing clinic.  Newt should be coming to me for writing advice.  

– “Just about every radio station in Florida runs a segment at some point where they cover Florida man. I didn’t have a chance to look through all of the comments on this video, but if you’re ever searching for some more ideas the reason why Florida man is so common is because Florida has something called the Sunshine State law. What that means is that anything that is public record has to be available for everyone. Since it is, you get to hear more about the crazy people in Florida than any other state.”

– “Still blows my mind the Californians could be short sighted on Florida man. When even Czech people know about it, it’s not just some east coast thing”

So it seems like this is a phenomena.  People know about this Florida Man meme.  And that’s all this is.  Newt just made a comic about this fucking meme like so many other people have done before him..

At least we got through the video.  Erin released a new video.  Just some shitty Twitch stream but it will be a relief to get away from Newt for at least a little while.  I get the feeling that NewtMania is going to be running wild this month, what with the comic book being released and all.  Hopefully, I’m able to get a copy.