Crying Inside

2nd November 2023

 

Dear Comedian,

You’re looking for a writer for dark comedy, film, and a variety of projects that you’ve been working on. I have some experience in the world of dark comedy, more in comedy news, and I have the dark past of a true comedian. All the best funny folks are crying inside.

I would still say that the best argument is results and that you should let me have a look at something. I do what I do with it and if you like my work we can talk further. Pin ribbons on a dead pig, and it’s still a dead pig, throw mud on a T-Rex and he still can gobble you down.

I have some experience in the logic less and mostly blue world of social media, and I can run your Facebook page, YouTube channel, ticktalk, and X the platform formerly known as twitter. I know about metrics and promotions for these platforms. I currently have about six thousand subscribers on YouTube.

I spent a few years working on a YouTube channel called Absurd TV writing comedy news, because that was cheap and easy to produce. There are a lot of Absurd TVs on YouTube so you’ll need a link to find it. When I met the man that runs that channel, he was spending ten thousand dollars a year making twelve videos and, because I was working for free, we dropped that to less than five hundred dollars putting out more than two hundred.

However, this never translated into him spending more on promotion. It became clear that he just wasn’t interested in success. I can tell you, the man has been in a lot of backyard movies that find their way to tubi, but more is not always better. ‘Amityville Karen’ sounded like so much fun, but watch it, and you’ll never have another sleepless night.

Truth be told, if you want to work with me I’m going to hit this like it’s been talking about my mother, because my life sucks, and I need to bring my A game to every match.

Best,



Richard Leland Neal

Collaborators

24th October 2023

Hay there YouTube People,

I’m an insane fat man trying to save the world. I linked my success to planting trees and cleaning the ocean so your request for collaborators may do some good for the world. I mention this often in my YouTube videos. However, this is of little interest to you.

My main thing is movie reviews on the YouTube channel ‘Random Street Theater’ and food reviews on my Blog ‘Richard Reviews Everything’. I had a stint as a comedy news writer and voice actor on Absurd TV. I have done comedy impersonations of Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Rudy Giuliani. I also voice for Absurd TV two Russians, QAnon, two mice technicians, a Zoologist foot, the announcer, and an alien.

Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m69RUhM2EGE

I stopped working with Absurd TV when they moved on to other content. I was working for free anyway, and the few hundred videos I wrote and performed in were never promoted so I got very little feedback.

As an actor, I have been compared to John Candy, Chris Farley, and Peter Griffin. I’ve been in a few short films and stage plays. I work the night shift so I normally can get to shoots during the day.

What I brought to the table with Absurd TV was a business minded drive to make the best videos at the lowest price. I like to make good use of what we have, and I was always trying to be sure the editor had something to work on because you never knew when he was going to have time to work.

I dropped their cost by ninety five percent and increased video output from twelve videos a year to well over two hundred. Now, they do shorts which they just don’t need me for. I did write shorts for them, but it just isn’t going to get monetized at the numbers they pull and so what’s the point?

Best,



Richard



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Yellowstone - Yellowstone River

In the northwest corner of Wyoming, United States is the famous Yellowstone National Park. Established by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872, this 3,468 sq mi (8,983km²) park is home to more than half of the world’s geysers and geothermal and hydrothermal features. Yellowstone is the first national park in the United States and is widely considered the oldest in the world. In 1978 it was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

With its unspoiled forests, mountains, lakes, canyons and rivers, Yellowstone has the largest concentration of mammals in the contiguous United States and more than 1,700 native species of trees and plants.

Taking an anti-clockwise approach to my route, I began my journey at the Mud Volcano Thermal Area. Located near one of Yellowstone Volcano’s vents, the area is known for its muddy hot springs and fumaroles. The trail is a loop that’s less than a mile (1km) long beginning with the Mud Cauldron, a large, steaming muddy pool. Over a short hill to the left is the boiling pool, Mud Geyser, which used to erupt muddy water up to 50ft (15m) high during the 1800s.

The trail leads to the Churning Cauldron, tossing muddy water. This area used to be a cool pool filled with bacteria until earthquakes in the late 1970s greatly increased its temperature.

Slightly off the boardwalk is the large sizzling Black Dragon’s Cauldron. It exploded into existence in 1948 along a crack in the earth, coating the nearby trees in mud. Just beyond the cauldron is the extremely acidic Sour Lake with its milky-green colour. Sour Lake is a result of microbes and the high levels of sulphur found in the area.

Near the end of the trail is Dragon’s Mouth Spring, named by a park visitor in 1912. Boiling water rolls out of a cavern nowadays but pre-1994, the water used to spill out like a wave, often splashing water as far as the boardwalk. Steam and gases exploded through the water inside the cavern, emitting strange rumbling noises. Between the noises and spitting water one can imagine the flick of a dragon’s tongue, making the name quite fitting.

Many of the trees on this trail are cooked by steam. An earthquake swarm in 1978, that lasted seven months, increased the heat and caused the vegetation to die. This area is known for having the greatest uplift and sinking of Yellowstone’s Caldera floor and as such many faults gather here making earthquakes quite common and the hydrothermal features one of the most acidic in the park.

This was a great start. I look forward to discovering more geysers, fumaroles and hot springs. With more than 10,000 hydrothermal features, I suspect there’ll be no shortage of bubbling pools, spitting geysers or steamy vents on my trip.



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Useless College Degrees do Not Exist?

November 14th 2023

Dear Daily Titan,

With things being what they are and unrest on college campuses across the world, I had an inkling to look in on my alma mater and found the article ‘Useless College Degrees do Not Exist’ by Diana Michelle Robles. This opinion piece detailed a TikTok video about what degree has the lease value and went on to say that there were other merits to obtaining a degree than monetary gain.

This is where my many years as a college graduate kicked in, and I need to point out a few flaws in the logic of Robles here. First, in the video the question was “What is the most useless major”. You can rephrase this as “which degree has the least value”. If you asked “which painting by Picasso is the most worthless” there is a right answer for this, and the painting in question could still be worth millions of dollars.

You can argue for some kind of value in some situation for any degree if you like. This would hold true for a degree from the now defunct Trump University or a degree in fairy hunting. Yes, that’s a thing. Any blanket statement being false, you can literally print a degree on your computer and find some situation where it is a use to someone.

So let us ask, ‘are there degrees of negligible value?’ and the answer to that is ‘yes’. I can say that as a theater arts student I had a Cal State Fullerton professor tell me that I would never make a penny in theater, because he had lost his retirement in the economic crisis of two thousand eight. He was going to blacklist me, and theater is mostly a word of mouth occupation.

Henry David Thoreau refused to pay the five-dollar fee to obtain his Harvard degree. Paying that fee, about a hundred and sixty dollars in twenty-twenty-three money, he would still be one of America’s best-known philosophers. This leads us to Robles’s second major problem, as Thoreau had gotten an education his degree was of no value.

It is the scholastic education experience that builds character. If character building is a reasonable measure of value, it can be said that all the education up to the last test is as good as all the education and the last test to graduate. The degree is of no consequence to character building, but can there be an educational experience that is of negligible or of no value?

I would say the answer to that is ‘yes’ as well. As a general point, teachers can be wrong. The Nazis educated people, but I don’t believe the character built by this education would be of value. ‘Better untaught than ill taught’ is a saying for good reason.

If I may push this point, when I came to Cal State Fullerton as a theater arts major, I was enthusiastic. I had done exceptionally well as a playwright at the City College and was looking forward to a bigger and better program. What I ran into then was the old guard of teachers past their mandatory retirement but still in classes because there were too many to replace.

At the state college in playwriting, I had readings almost every session which went very well, but at CSUF I had a handful of readings, most of which the professor stopped halfway through. She would then throw a temper tantrum, demand I be in her class the next semester, and cry about how I wasn’t following the course textbook. The class text had been written by a friend of hers and she wanted it to sell well.

This professor harassed me until I dropped the major twelve units from graduation in favor of Psychology. She did at one point offer to permit me to take part in the playwriting program for free, but she demanded I write plays that adhered to her political beliefs and were perverted. This is against the law, if you didn’t know, but when I reported it I was either dismissed out of hand or worse laughed at.

This education left me bitter and angry. It took something I loved and turned it into something I hated. Worst of all, I don’t believe I could come back today and start over. If I did, what would I accomplish?

Yes, a degree can be worthless, and an education can be as well. Even if you thought of all degrees as free some can still be far from worth obtaining. Then you look at student loans, and remember that some people spend the rest of their lives paying for an education that may have done nothing but build their character, or in my case, wound my soul.

Chew on that,





Richard Leland Neal

Persons for a Better Future

1st November 2023

Dear, um, Persons for a Better Future?

It looks like what you want is a roundtable discussion about the state of the world and how we can improve it that you can tape and show folks. Sounds odd to me, I mean, there is so much wrong with the world and you’ve given me little as to what you want talked about.

Will we talk about the homeless, prison reform, education, wildfires? All of which are things that need talking about and all of them intersect and impact each other. Prisoners fight wildfires, become homeless, and need education. Better education should lead to less wildfires, fewer prisoners and less people falling into homelessness.

More to the point, employing the homeless in fighting wildfires should lead to fewer of them committing crimes to survive. This should lead to fewer prisoners and a better standard of living. Do I need to explain how that would impact education?

So, why include me, other than my being an underemployed American, and that I have skin in this fight for a better future? Well, folks say I’m well read on most topics. I have a degree in Psychology, and I’ve spent six years working with the homeless. I spent a few years working with ex-convicts as well.

If you want to ask me about windmills I can tell you about what happens when their decommissioned, talk about vertical blade options, and bring up how they should be implemented on both farms and freeways. If you want to talk about solar power I can go into the environmental impact of tower plants, the issues with most installation companies, and why the option isn’t working.

Why am I good for this workshop? I guess I’m about as good as anyone.

Best,


Richard Leland Neal