We're not nihilists, but we also believe that if everyone on this planet was to not take anything too seriously there would be world peace. And we're quite serious about that. We have learned much in 5 years of working on this site, outlined below:

• We have learned that putting content online, with no corporate or legal status, means people who DO get paid to be creative are free to plunder your site for content.
  
• We have learned that the site is merely, as one writer put it, an "Onion knockoff", because we all know that only The Onion has ever lampooned the news, and reaching more people and being a corporate entity means you are the de facto source for any product and everyone else is in fact only an imitator, even if a founding partner had never heard of The Onion and the other was inspired by Mad Magazine and Frank Zappa.
  
• We learned that spoofing another web entity can lead to that entity's attorney sending you a cease-and-desist letter, even though Humor Is Dead does not make a dime, and that very company it spoofed makes its living spoofing other companies, that being the core of its business.
  
• We learned that we are "liberal", and that is a derogatory thing nowadays, so we should be

  Is This Supposed To Be Funny? Well if you can't laugh at the end of the world, you're not thoroughly enjoying the time you have. Laugh a little before we all ... BOOM! Gotcha! Here we birth an internet, and some good stuff gets on it. Then the marketing department figures it out and slowly it gets shitty. And then certain people above the marketing department catch on and it gets shittier still. Not all of it ... but like a ocean that's ever-expanding, and with that an ever-growing percentage of shit floating in it. Read a bunch, find a bunch more, piece it together, find a few doosies from yesteryear, some from last week, over time you see a few key patterns, and then it slowly all turns into reruns. Gigantic piles of corruption or immorality that can easily fit into buckets of God, Money, and Control. Try to pick one individual cause to fight. Forget it. You can't do, for instance, just "environmental causes". Which one!? You can fight one battle at a time, or you can write about everything, and maybe once in a great while someone trips over something we've written in here and it hits them square in the f'n head. They get it. Maybe that happened to you recently. Good! Thanks for catching on so quickly ... it's already 2005 for fucks sake! At last count there were about six bazillion blogs in operation ... and at least seven of them are pretty good. OK - more like 100,000. Go read something unsponsored.

  ashamed of ourselves. This despite, as far as we know, not being liberal, but rather, and very clearly, anarcho-fascists.
  
• We learned that humor that exposes the reality of grim or disturbing situations is actually pessimism and hopelessness, as well as anti-americanism. We will begin behaving more agreeably immediately.
  
• We learned that the most popular search term people used to find our site was "big booty", followed by "big butt", "whore", "buddy icons", and "butt sex", in that order. #32 was "propylene glycol alginate"

• This is not profitable, and, being animals and human beings, we do things only to profit ourselves. News and cultural satire for this medium is no longer creatively profitable. It is formulaic, and it is boring. This is why one can simply go here. It saves everyone valuable time. Time we could spend doing better things. Like fishing, for example.

That being said, humor on the web has indeed evolved. There was a time when all you had to do was email an edited image of, say, Porky Pig with a hard-on. Thousands laughed. Some web companies even built entire businesses around such things (you can read about that in our equally non-profitable book, Dot Conned).

Eventually, web citizens grew tired of such filth, and instead found more sophisticated humor in the form of, for example, President Bush's head on a porn star's body, Bin Laden's head on a porn star's body, Bush's head on a porn star's body fucking a porn star body with Bin Laden's head on it, Bin Laden's head on a porn star's body fucking a porn star body with Bush's head on it, and so forth. We had our fun then, too.

But we realized all these things are IMPORTANT and need to be taken very SERIOUSLY. We live in a very serious day and age, like Star Wars. There is a struggle between good and evil going down, and it's just not right to joke about that. This is not just biology playing itself out on a global playing field we have here. This is not just one of thousands of animal species butting heads over resources and killing each other. No. because we're special. We drive big cars. We buy and sell stuff. And that makes us better. So there.

In fact, we are serious, and these are serious times. America appears to have forgotten what it stands for and why it exists. Like any system, it appears to be crumbling. We've had a great run, we must admit. But the head knows that the body responds to fear. You can sell that just like you can sell toothpaste. And you can use the same methods. They've been proven to work. 3 out of 4 dentists agree to that. And, since we're American, we have freedom, and other people do not. We have the freedom to vote for BushClinton and freedom to buy things. So there again.

So we bid you adieu, and go in search of bigger and better things, knowing full well that we cannot make a difference, and that we'd be far better off taking the advice of P.T. Barnum and devising methods of economic conquest over the slobbering masses. But we insist on doing other things that might entertain 3 or 4 of you out there and maybe...just maybe...might make you give us your money. These are listed here:

Adwhore will be put on its own server, continue to run, and be updated more often

The Papaya Project (in development), a new and interesting musical endeavor, is in the process of being mixed and packaged. It stems from various collaborations as musicisdead.com, which will be laid to rest. Some preliminary music can be found here, with more to come.

Battlestar America - A band from New York City we hope you will listen to that includes at least one member of this project.

The Onion-o-Matic - We've replaced the entire writing staff with the Onion-o-Matic, a beat up Linux box here in the office that randomly generates quasi-hilarious content. Get yourself a fresh slice of biting satire every time you visit the page, guaranteed!

Trout Fishing in America (self-explanatory)

Regards,
The Management

References and materials available upon request