Letter from an Anonymous AC Millionaire

Thank you for your lovely letter, and please accept my humble apologies for taking such a long week to respond. Truth be told, Associated Content is driving me mad. Literally. I may once have had a fine mind - thank you kindly for that comment - but these days it feels like my cognitive processes are being rung like a towel, or destroyed the incessant playing of an out-of-tune glockenspiel.

You mentioned, nay, envied my 900 trillion page views, but let me tell you something. It is not worth it.

My ride on the emotional roller coaster that is Associated Content started innocently enough. I had always seen myself as a potential writer, and here was my chance. I published a few random articles - a political piece, a tribute to an old friend and a couple of poems. It took a few weeks, but eventually the comments began trickling in.

It was nice to get feedback, but it didn't satisfy me, I wanted more, I craved more, I spent sleepless nights tossing and turning as the burning desire for comments consumed me. I gave myself the goal of publishing three times a day, and disciplined myself into subscribing to everyone who commented, and commenting on every published piece from every single one of these writers. I checked my email every 10 minutes to see if I had got any comments. I trawled the AC forums every half hour, contributing to everything and anything, even writing a 500 word comment on an article on how to make paper napkins. I forced myself to spend an hour every day simply browsing and commenting on content by new AC members. I figured they would lap up any comments they would get, and probably favourite me immediately. I'm ashamed to say it, but I was using them.

Oh the page views, probably the most powerful drug in existence. Watching them climb was wonderful. I remember the days when a 10 PV jump would bring delight and joy to my soul. After the first 100 PV jump I smoked a cigar in celebration. These days I find myself disappointed with a jump of anything less than ten million PVs.

Eventually, every day I was publishing 100 articles, and commenting on 1000. It was at this point that my eyesight began to wane. At the end of each day I had to peel my contact lenses off with a spatula, and the doctors said that I would be blind within three months.

I had to do something drastic, so I hired a couple of teenage hackers to write me some sneaky little programs. These little code monkeys had nothing better to do, so I paid them each a fiver and they wrote me three little tools.

The first is my article generator. This trawls the web looking for subjects, indexing them against my previously published articles to prevent subjects being overly repeated. You mentioned my "10,000 articles about uncommon cat ailments". Dagnammit galdammit, I'll have to investigate that, there must be a glitch in the program.

Any way, the script then collates facts on the chosen subject, and then translates them into my own style, substituting in phrases, terms, gags from a "J.J." glossary held in a database.

The second script is my commenter - or should I say commentator?. Who knows. Certainly not a literary fraud like me. Anyway, this simply scans my inbox for emails informing me that so-and-so has been published. It essentially clicks the link, and generates a comment on the article. You have noticed that some of my comments have been slightly, ahem, random. One writer asked me what I meant when I said that his article on Microsoft's Firewall "gave my gerbil a headache". I lambasted the teenage hackers for this, I would have hoped that "gerbil" would be in the "naughty words" list, i.e. the list of words that are never used in my supposed comments.

The third script is my "responder". This picks up on every new comment I receive and responds by subscribing to the AC member (if I haven't already subscribed), and thanks them for their comments. If you've found my "Thanks for the comments, hope you enjoy the rest of your day" messages a little generic, then now you know why.

So the truth is out. I believe I now have 1000 trillion page views, 100 trillion in the past week, and rather than being the literary workhorse that so many have believed, I actually sit at home each day drinking Jack Daniels while watching a live graph of my page views.

I expect they will lock me up, and take away my earnings. Before they do, fancy that coffee?

J.J.