I’d like to extend you a warm welcome to peachytone - the reddest magazine on the World Wide Web. Extranet version four point oh is here, today - right now… at this very moment - and denotes several key changes and additions - many of which you’ve already seen these past weeks, including - thank God - a site-wide disabling of comments, a refreshed color palette, section visuals & footer, and our darling typography. No, we did not plan the launch in accordance with the solar eclipse, but it’s an awfully-poetic coincidence of reinvention, yes?
Didn’t think us capable of such mysticism? Go read your horoscope, bilgeweed.
Nels Nelson’s Future Machine is unquestionably the most editorially relevant property we’ve ever absorbed. I’d love to tell you that August’s horoscope was simply a placeholder for the platform until we could find ourselves (where would you even begin?) a Real Life Star Scribe, but it was - in fact - the legitimate, abstract predictions of Nelson Nelson - Creative Director, Hell.
Consider: Extratone - building beautiful, one-of-a-kind platforms for the cheapest jokes.
Our dearest Prose Ghost - K. I. Eleutherios XVII - wrote both of our features, this month: The Truth About Kayaks, and The Ven - neither of which were true, in the slightest, nor marked as such in any way. (Oops. Sorry.) Honestly, though, do you actually need to be explicitly told whether or not what you’re reading/watching is satire, in this climate. Can you, even?
Is this a joke?
I don’t know. Does it matter?
Actually, yes, it does, when you’re throwing around threats of violence, like my announcement and “pledge drive” a few weeks ago claiming I’d kill a small, pitiful cocker-spaniel if we did not gain five subscribers in 5 hours. As I explained in my super-New-Media-Medium-Post, I was genuinely surprised at how negatively many readers, friends, and staff reacted.
Obviously, My Post wouldn’t be difficult to classify as an apology, per se, but a sort of rant out of one genuine sentiment: really, dude? You think I’m actually threatening to hurt an animal for patrons??!! Blame’s not relevant, but I know for a fact that y’all are smarter than that.
I’m still not quite sure how to respond, and with just my limited life experience, I know that all attempts to parse misunderstandings of this nature lead to unnecessary - and often, highly unpleasant - bouts of silent seething, rejection, and/or general passive aggression. The thing is - being “misunderstood” is not a disease - it is a result of your poor ability to communicate yourself and your ideas. Children throw tantrums when they’re frustrated with their inability to communicate - you wouldn’t be wrong to suggest that my decision to behave this way was nothing but an edgy, Big Boy equivalent, and you won’t see anything like it again, from us. (It should also be noted that neither Hawthorn nor Tim condoned it, particularly, so it’s a* confirmed blunder*, regardless of anything.)
Though that’s not quite all of it, I’m afraid - I was trying to argue a position, and - despite how foully I went about it - it is a pillar of Extratone’s existence. When I happened to glance at my Recode Media feed to see Jack Conte’s name, I was embarrassingly giddy. Peter Kafka is perhaps the best media reporter ever to grease the stale annals of insider-industry culture and his opposite embodies the w h i t e c r e a t i v e s t a r t u p.