We're big LOST fans

Embrace your inner gamer because LOST Season 5 is about to wind down and leave us fiending for Season 6 like whoa. With only 4 hours left in the season, it might be time to brush up on your Locke-knowledge on the wonder that is Lostpedia. Like Wikipedia, Lostpedia provides a tangled web of links that can explain, confirm, or disprove all ideas, theories, or speculations with the help of the online LOST fan community. I could literally spend 6 hours a day going from fan theories on Richard Alpert to a mini-section on "Ben's painting" to a list of cultural references in "The Constant."

hmm?

Don't even get me started on the pages that explain the LOST writers-and-producers-created alternate reality games like The Lost Experience that reveal the mythology behind the show. This shit can get CREEPY, like a little too Dungeon and Dragons for me, but if you're up for a challenge/scare, you could really waste a work week going through it.

Buggin'

Currently my favorite theory on Lostpedia is that Ben's childhood best friend Annie from the Season 3 classic "The Man Behind the Curtain" is actually the little kid version of Kate's mom Diane Janssen. (Diane... hmm, DI-Anne as in Dharma Initiative Annie? Kate's middle name is Anne, after all.) That could mean that Kate was born on the island and it would create a whole new potential of crazy! Of course my theories are always wrong (I really really really wanted Matthew Abbadon to be future Walt), but who cares!

The best part about the site: no spoilers.

If that doesn't help you waste enough time @ work, then check out this awesome LOST-Muppet Babies mash-up that's been floating around the net for a few weeks.

Bruthuh?

Or you could write something and submit it to us. LOST-related or not.

Career Shmareer

Pamela Slim has a great article in the New York Times about the economic downfall being as good a' reason as any for leaving your career and pursuing the dream job you've always been, well, dreaming of. Check it out.

If this article makes you turn off your work computer, book it toward the elevator, and happily march off into the sunset never to be seen again by your employers and coworkers, then we at YWGP salute you.

Thanks to Steve for the heads up.

*Any article link we suggest can be reached simply by clicking on the word "article." We're working on changing the link color, but get off our back, we're at work.

To MFA or not to MFA?

NYTimes has a great article by Charles McGrath about two new books that weigh the merits of getting your MFA in creative writing. For those of us here at youwillgetpapercuts, the MFA debate looms at the back of our brains. Should writers go to school to learn how to write, and pay a huge tuition bill in the meantime, when, as McGrath points out, "few of even the most ardent teachers of creative writing believe it can really be taught" ??? The world may never know, but the inner debate will surely rage on. May this article be added to the mental blaze as we measure the hypothetical pros and cons.

Mark Zuckerberg Has Dorm Syndrome

Well, it's lunch time in the Cave, which usually means eating at my desk and watching Woody Allen movies on NetFlix, or facebook-ing. Yes, I am ashamed of myself for using the word "facebook" as a verb, but thanks to Mark Zuckerberg (or Suck-erberg, hahaha, fistbump!), the word is very much a part of the cultural lexicon.

Friends and I were drunkenly discussing the facebook phenomenon, critiquing its new format, debating on whether it's ahead of the times or if the times simply adapt themselves to whatever facebook decides. We came to a sad conclusion that on the most part, present company included, a drastic change in facebook is usually met with a lazy shoulder shrug, a wave of the hand, and an obligatory, "Eh, just trust facebook, I'll adapt to it sooner or later."

So is facebook taking advantage of our generation's rampant ennui, or is Signore Zuckerberg the patron saint of our collective apathy? He is only a 24 year old college dropout who started a website to rate the ladies of his not-quite-alma-mater. This site, however, has morphed into the facebook you all know and love, landing him on Time Magazine's The World's Most Influential People List for 2008, the cursed cover of Forbes magazine, and into the hotseat of being one of the country's youngest CEO's ever. Pretty impressive, until you actually see this douchebag:














Boom. Adidas sandals? And I trusted this asshole? Adidas sandals, every time all the time. This isn't a fucking swim meet, you rich prick. We're not in a dorm shuffling from our bedroom to the showers. We're running a multimillion dollar company and cyberstalking each and every one of our clients. At least wear dress socks. Or better yet, lets do a little Mark Zuckerberg Exchange Program: I'll slip around in your sandals and NorthFace fleece, chestbumping my fellow douches all day, and you come wear the dorkyasssshit I wear to work and put in a 9-to-5 in the Cave. You wouldn't last an hour.

Zuckerberg looks like the kind of dude who roofies the Gatorade at a high school girls field hockey game. So it's no wonder his newly amended Terms of Service is essentially an internet gangrape on your rights, allowing facebook ownership of anything and everything you post, always and forever. Beware Zuckerberg. I know you're standing on the mountain that is facebook, looking down at your minions, chanting "I own you" while high fiving yourself, but there will come a day when you're nothing more than a synonym for Friendster.

So I have a new motto: Don't Trust Facebook. In order of this motto, I will be making t-shirts:



Contact youwillgetpapercuts@gmail.com if you're interested in purchasing one.

Delusional Downtown Divas

Watching someone else’s quarter-life crisis is much more fun than dealing with your own. Delusional Downtown Divas, directed by Lena Dunham, hilariously takes care of all your 20-something Schadenfreude needs.

The web tv series, available on Index Magazine’s site, documents the lofty goals and lazy realities of best friends Oona, Swann, and AgNess (and their sometimes friends and roommates Jazzy and Molly.) Oona dreams of falling in love with New York art star Jake Pheasant, played nonchalantly by Nate Lowman. Swann, while not teasing her bleached blonde hair into a beehive of terror, choreographs private performance art to prepare for showing at Miami Basel. AgNess takes a brief stint as a Brooklyn artist’s assistant to buy bicycles so the fearsome threesome can stalk Pheasant. In the meantime, the trio runs into famed curator Clarissa Dalrymple, Art Production Fund’s Yvonne Force Villareal, and renowned sage Isaac Mizrahi, among others.

All 10 episodes celebrate the insular yet international art world and skewers it in all its ridiculousness at once, but ultimately DDD is about three young, creative women trying to make it into the New York scene. Through their clueless, traipsing adventures they stand by each other in times of mood lipstick, bad fruit jewelry, and droopy smiley face balloons, and by the end of the series, we’re left wishing to be a part of their own flamboyant, cutely sarcastic and naive scene based in AgNess’s father’s Tribeca loft.

Inaugural Collage

The Cave-Dan

This is where the magic happens. Co-workers have affectionately called this "The Cave." Since there is another Dan working at (Blank) & (Blank) and having two people with the same name in the work place is apparently frowned upon, I have been nicknamed "The Cave-Dan."

Having no sunlight makes it impossible to even have a plant back here. So in some ways, The Cave-Dan is a rare specie. It thrives under artificial light and little human contact; has a regimented diet of packed lunches and high speed internet; is recognized by its poor posture and carpal tunnel syndrome.

Even if I had a window, I'd only be able to see across Park Ave and into other people's offices.

Hi, my name is YouWillGetPapercuts

We at YouWillGetPapercuts are recognizing a sad trend. Is our creativity dying a little from our day jobs, or just getting really stifled? We are firm believers that writers, no matter how “successful,” will write through anything, even a nine-to-five.

We created this space for people like us: young and bright folk who are underpaid, overqualified, and bored.

Admit it. You should be making photocopies, listening in on that important conference call, or getting papercuts while mailing packages off to exotic countries. Instead you're doing character sketches for your first novel, writing song lyrics on the back of a receipt, or making a life-size replica of Michael Jackson's head out of chewing gum and white-out.

Whatever it is that you're doing, show us what you've got. Send us what you’re writing, let us see what pictures you’re taking, clue us in to what we should be listening to, and tell us why you hate your boss and how much better of a job you could do.

We will read anything and everything you send us, but we will only publish what we like.

Work in Progress

Hello friends, family, and internet brethren. We have just begun this experiment and will hopefully update soon....