“Most listeners, and I’m talking about 99%, don’t call in, respond, or engage in an active way,” a content creator once said.

On June 9, 2009, we created our first article on WordPress, and it was awful, terrible, and irredeemable, but it was something that we decided to publish. We had no idea what this site would mean to us, what we were trying to say, and we had no vision. No one read it, why would they, but it was the first time we posted something fifteen years ago.

As exciting as it is for us to write articles, we now know who we are, and we know no one is ever going to mistake us for the greatest writers on the planet. Yet, there is a boatload of work and passion poured into each article, and they are our creations. They are us, we are them. As with any proud parents, some make our brain tingle, and others embarrass us. We thought they were so good at the time, but going back and reading them left us no choice but to relegate them to the draft pile. Some remind us of the passionate drive and laborious hours we put into trying to make sense of our inspiration, and some ideas were so good that we felt like we were just transcribing an idea that hit us at three in the morning, staring at the ceiling. Where do ideas come from? Who cares, just do it, and if you do it often enough, ideas just sort of fall out, or into, your brain while you’re doing something else.   

The one thing we’ve found, over the course of the fifteen years this site has been active, is that most readers read without leaving any comments. Granted most of the nearly 1,000 articles on this site make a concerted effort to avoid provocation in the shock jock vein, but so few comment that we thought today, our 15^th anniversary, might provide our readers an excellent opportunity to drop us a line or two about how you think we’re doing so far. 

Those of us in an audience enjoy what content creators create from afar, and while the content obviously appeals to us in some way, it really has nothing to do with us, so what do we have to add? It’s a good point, but that doesn’t mean content creators don’t want to hear from us. Some content creators make a ton of money, others have millions of subscribers and fame, but some low-rent, anonymous scribes would love to read some feedback from those who read them. 

If you want to drop a long-form note on how you think we’re doing so far, any constructive criticism would be appreciated. If you can conjure up some highlights, or low lights, we’d love to hear that too. Are there any themes or styles we’ve developed that you enjoy, are there any general comments you have about the site that can help us improve or narrow our focus, we’d love any feedback you have in that regard. If all you want to do is wish us a happy anniversary for this site, or you just want to shout into a semi-permeable and intangible well, we’re all ears. We would love to hear from you, whether you’re a regular reader, or you just pop in every once in a while. You don’t have to reveal anything about yourself, just drop a line that says either, “I love what you’re doing. I particularly loved this article, and I wish you would do more like it.”  “I came to your site after searching for something on (fill in the blank), but I’ve been reading your articles ever since,” or “You suck! I get so sick of reading about your theories about this particular topic. Get over yourself and write about what you’re best at, which is …” Whatever it is, we would enjoy hearing from you.

Thank You

Regardless whether you comment or not, we want to take the moment of our 15^th year celebration to tell you how much we appreciate you. We could write an entire article about how much pride it gives us to see that someone, somewhere has read one of our babies. Writers, who know their ins and outs far better than us, inform us that the number of visitors to a site is far more important than the number of views, as advertisers don’t care how many views content creators acquire, they want to see unique visits. We understand that line of thinking, as it pertains to the business side of content creation, but we really don’t care what advertisers think. We consider it the absolute pinnacle of pride when a visitor finds an article so interesting that they want to see how we tackle another subject. Isn’t that the greatest compliment a reader can offer a content creator of any kind? We think it is. 

The reason we are so grateful, aside from the obvious, is that the content on this site was created by what we might call a disinterested student, or that’s what our classmates called us in the ways all students characterize, stigmatize, and label one another. If our school handed out those “Most/least likely to …” awards every other school seemed to do, they might have nominated us “Least likely to be read, or read,” or the least likely to know what a homograph is. They would’ve been shocked to learn that anyone, anywhere, would want to read something we wrote, and they might be stunned to learn that we wrote anything beyond our signature endorsement on the back of a low-skilled labor check. 

The idea that anyone would want to read anything we wrote is still, fifteen years since we first decided to write our first article on WordPress, a great source of pride, and we do not take any of you for granted. We’re still going to keep popping them out no matter what happens, and we hope to put in another fifteen years before we’re done, but we’d love to hear you tell us what we think. How are we doing so far? 

An Historical Tour of Rilaly.com

If you’re a newbie, welcome to the world of Rilaly.com. We’d like to give you the grand tour of our site, as we think our showcase will provide something to entertain you, and we hope to entertain you while providing a little education.

For those of you who have been reading our articles for a while now, I think you’ll agree that if there’s one thing we know about Rilaly.com it’s that we know nothing. We don’t know what we’re going to write about next any more than you do, and that sense of discovery is what keeps us passionately pursuing this every day. Here’s what we love. We love learning, or just spontaneously coming up with a new topic on a decidedly different subject? This is normally a days long process. At another point, we make a decision and write it out. About three to four paragraphs in, we made a decision. We don’t know whether it’s worthy at this time or not, but we keep writing. It either achieves a noteworthy shape, changes, or totally transforms at another point, we usually arrive at something, “something”. What is “something”? We don’t know yet, but we want to cover a topic, in most cases, in a way most have never considered before. We dig for those chewy, little morsels that can be found in everyone’s bio, because we think they reveal something we didn’t know about them a day before. 

We were as excited to present our views on grilling as we were the first article we wrote about the strange. Our first great article, and that which propelled us to greater heights was The Thief’s Mentality. We think we’ve written a number of great articles since, but The Thief’s Mentality was our first deep dive, and the entire process involved in writing that and Platypus People taught us a lot about ourselves. If you’ve never felt consumed by an article, story, or any artistic expression for a time in your life, we’d highly recommend it. Such obsessions are excellent for mental health and self-esteem. There’s something invigorating and life-affirming to the art of writing that allows one to discover more about themselves through the conduit of trying to explain others from your subjective point of view. 

We find the I’m right and he’s wrong perspective tedious. Our goal is not to promote a “you’re smart, we got it” angle, as we try to present the other side with as much objectivity as possible. “Total objectivity is impossible,” the eggheads of the world say, and it’s true, if we focus on the modifier total, but we can try to come as close as possible, and the effort will reveal a lot about us, our writing, and the story. We’ve all told stories, verbally, with the subject in the room, about other people in which we try to capture them and their essence, and they usually reply, “I didn’t say that, and that is as far from my state of mind as you can get.” It’s embarrassing to those of us who love to tell stories to think that we got it all wrong. We approach the more personal articles from the mindset that our subjects will read these stories, know it’s about them, and say, “I hate to admit it, but you pretty much nailed it.”  

We’ve also found our voice within the articles we’ve published, and we’ve learned all the varying ways of presenting each individual article in all the unique methods the individual articles require. Some of those articles required presentations that led to some challenging, laborious hours, and others flowed so sweetly that we couldn’t believe how easy it was. We don’t think that has much to do with talent as much as doing it so often that we almost can’t help but get better at it.  

“There’s no writer’s block. There’s lazy. There’s scared, but there’s no writer’s block. Just sit down and realize you’re mediocre and you’re going to have to put a lot of effort into this to make it good.” –Jerry Seinfeld

If a young writer asked us for advice, we would tell them to just do it. Just write it out to figure out if it works. If it doesn’t work, flip the perspective, mix the paragraphs around, and continue to funkify it until it does. If one thing doesn’t work, try another. We read an addendum to the old ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, and try again.’ The addendum is, ‘If it doesn’t work after the third try, give up, there’s no sense in making a fool of yourself. Some articles don’t work. For all the articles we’ve written that ended up working, there are probably as many that didn’t. If you can’t make it work, we suggest giving up and writing something else.    

The blinking cursor crowd mystifies us, “You’re staring at a blinking cursor trying to come up with ideas? Do you think it’s like a bus that makes stops at seventeen minute intervals?” No, you write it out and correct, edit, and write it all over in a way you never considered until you were three-fourths of the way through it, or you just delete everything you spent hours doing because there’s nothing there. You’re not a bomb technician, you’re a writer. You can make mistakes, and you should, because you’ll learn from them. 

We’ve read professional articles that include notes that state, “Edited on [a specific date] to include (or correct) the information in this article.” If we did that, post-publication, each article would probably have ten to twenty such notes. Most of the articles we’ve written here include everything from subtle tweaks to complete overhauls pre- and post-publication. We understand that professional writers have editors help them, but we don’t know how anyone can write an article without stepping away from it and correcting it with a fresh mind before considering it complete. One of the beautiful things about writing online articles is that it allows us to go back in time, in essence, to correct all of the errors we made in the past.  

The Revealing Nuggets

Some of the times, we cover big subjects of obvious interest, think Babe Ruth, Sigmund Freud, or Leonardo da Vinci, but we try to cover them from an angle most haven’t considered before.

Our modus operandi involves reading writers far more talented than us telling us everything we need to know about a particular subject. In the process of their grand overview, they drop a nugget of information others consider trivial about the subject. Most readers either skip such irrelevant information, or they raise a temporary eyebrow and forget about it soon thereafter. Some of these little insignificant nuggets have a way of bouncing around in our head, until we begin to obsess over it so much that we have try to weave that nugget into gold. We fail more often than we succeed, of course, but the successes are some of our favorite articles.

The most illustrative example of this for us occurred in reading Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci. In that biography, Isaacson noted that among the thousands of notes da Vinci left for himself was a note that suggested he wanted to explore the woodpecker’s tongue. It was a tiny note in the thousands of pages da Vinci left behind, and he never left any notes behind to suggest that he pursued its functionality. Done and done, move on right? We kept coming back to that nugget over and over, thinking that da Vinci’s fascination with the woodpecker’s tongue may have said as much, if not more, than any of da Vinci’s grander accomplishments. A writer of Walter Isaacson’s stature focuses on the grand overview in admirable and influential ways, but we little guys focus on the little stuff. We think that nugget goes to the heart of da Vinci’s insatiable curiosity, and his relentless pursuit of general knowledge. We wish we could identify with da Vinci’s artistic brilliance and obvious intellect, but we do identify with his insatiable curiosity. 

Other writers have told us everything we need to know about Sigmund Freud, but did you ever hear that Sigmund Freud once held a job, in his younger, formative years in which he was responsible for trying to answer the age-old question do eels have testicles? What did that pursuit say about Freud at the time, and how did that otherwise meaningless job in his career influence his mindset going forward?

Did you ever hear that the famous author Charles Bukowski hated Mickey Mouse? We’ve all made jokes about how much we hate Barney the Dinosaur, Elmo, and other cutesy characters created for children, but some of us go a step further. For most of us this is nothing more than a wink-and-a-nod joke, or a passing note, to illustrate that we have to listen to these characters, as our children watch them, hour after hour, for weeks and months at a time. Those who take this wink-and-a-nod joke further reveal some unusual levels of anger or frustration in life that can only be a commentary on some pre-existing elements of our character.

Speaking of pre-existing conditions, some men, and it is almost always men, argue the greatest athletes of all time. One of the core tenants of this argument is the “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” argument that suggests former athletes couldn’t compete in the modern game. The linebackers are too fast, the pitchers throw so much harder, and the modern NBA game is too fast and so much more wide open for an athlete of his caliber to compete. “Babe Ruth was the best player of his era, but he couldn’t compete in the modern era.” This argument might hold some water if we transported The Babe “as is” from the peak of his career to the modern era, but if he grew up in the modern era, in the same impoverished conditions? The list for why he couldn’t compete is long and detailed, but the one thing contrarians fail to account for is that by most accounts Ruth was a superior athlete, some might call him elite, and he had those intangible and timeless characteristics that would’ve translated in any era if he grew up in that era and had the same level of desperation to do whatever it took to succeed. 

These four men left their mark on the world, and they’re fascinating, but as with every famous figure, they left behind some revealing nuggets about their personalities. Who were these men in their private lives, we don’t know, but these little nuggets might give us some insight.  

When we talk about revealing nuggets of the human condition, we put forth effort to avoid covering the typical angles the nattering nabobs of negativity love to dwell on in their “bet you didn’t know” clickbait articles that focus on the most awful traits of our favorite, otherwise noble characters of history. “I’ll bet you didn’t know that Abraham Lincoln was actually a pretty awful person,” they write. These articles are ubiquitous, because they are wildly popular. We love to read/hear negative stories about people “everyone thinks was so great”, and it feels “refreshingly honest” to learn otherwise. The nattering nabobs of negativity live to tell us “the stuff your teachers and parents didn’t want you to know” and it just feels so deliciously naughty to learn, because we can’t wait to use it on the next person who thinks Abraham Lincoln was so noble and historical. 

We’re not immune to this pursuit. There was a day when we loved it when our teachers offered us those casual “bet you didn’t know” asides. We all love the tawdry stuff that supposedly broadens our perspective to view them as humans too, and that they were as susceptible to the salacious and sinful as we are. It humanizes them. We used to love dropping those juicy, little nuggets on anyone who brought up the noble characteristics that made them historical. We loved it back then, because it made us feel educated beyond the educated, but is this still a thing? Yes, yes, it is. We just saw a character on a highly-rated television show focus on it last night. It happened during a moment when the character was “educating” himself. Thus, the notion the empowering one through education means focusing on the negative. As we heard this character drop this provocative information, we couldn’t help but think this feels so trite now.

We had nattering nabobs of negativity information on another high-profile, historical figure. We had primary source information on that figure, and that figure stood against everything we hold dear. We spent about three days writing a two-thousand word article on the subject, we checked and rechecked the information from secondary sources and found primary source information that backed it up. We also checked with friends and family, and they never heard this information. We were so excited. We considered it delicious scoop, and we thought it could be one of those rare, evergreen articles that could attract readers and clicks for a long time, but after putting in all the work we did on this subject, we decided to scrap the article. As painful as that decision was, we decided we didn’t want to be viewed as a site that peddled in such negative material.  

Rilaly.com covers niche information about the big guys, and we cover the middle ground, at times, but if you’ve read the articles on this board, you know we’re far more interested in the little. We’re always trying to figure out what makes us tock, as opposed to tick. There’s nothing we love more than exploring an inconsequential moment in our lives that leaves the reader with that “What do you want me to do with this?” reaction. Even the characters involved in these little, relatively inconsequential moments probably considered them so inconsequential that if we were ever made any money off it, they wouldn’t come calling with a team of lawyers, because they wouldn’t even remember being involved in it. It was, as far as they were concerned, an inconsequential moment involving inconsequential characters. There was nothing literary about it, to their mind, much less memorable.  

When we were first introduced to the comedic stylings of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, we finished each episode of their sitcoms with this notion that they were speaking a different kind of language, our language. The “You ever noticed this…” or the “Don’t you hate when …” style of obsessive and neurotic writing spoke to us on another level. The Beatles appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show was said to have birthed a number of the musicians and bands we know from the seventies, we wonder how many writers, comedians, and other contributors to Planet Funny found some level of influence from Seinfeld. We don’t know how Seinfeld affected others, of course, but we had a “I didn’t know we could do that” spark that led to a “How can I do that?” epiphany in us.

Our friends instructed us to watch this show called Seinfeld, “Because you will love it. I think it’s hilarious,” they added, “but you, you’ll love it.” They were right, of course, but the what do I do with this? questions were followed by a how do I make this me? question. How do I find my voice in their oeuvre? One thing we began doing was to focus on “the other side” of the presentation. When your friend told us their story of the day, our first inclination was what did the other people do, think, or want? (Warning: Most people hate this.) When we would watch a movie, we’d wonder what the other side thought of the matter, and we did this with the books we read, and the news stories we heard. Focusing on the other side not only teaches us the power of manipulation, but it teaches perspective. If we weren’t focusing on the minutiae that all of the “others” of my life considered meaningless at birth, we’ve been focusing on it for as long as we can remember. It was a part of us long before that show aired, but that show helped us focus on this area with more interest.   

The Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm influence led to the positives and negatives of Rilaly.com. If you’ve read the articles on this site, the one thing you know is we’re all over the place. The positive is that we’re not bordered by boundary. Most of the articles focus on an illusory weird, strange and just plain different theme, but we have numerous others about philosophy, money and investing, math, sports, history, science, and parenting. To our mind, there is no prototypical Rilaly.com article. It’s a genre-less, category-free website that allows us to write about whatever the hell we want. We don’t get paid for it, and, here comes the negative, we probably never will. If you’ve ever read book reviews of essay compilations, on Goodreads or Amazon, you know that readers often express a desire for thematic tie-ins that lead to a bona fide conclusion that pulls all of the threads together. They, generally, express no desire to read a blog book, as it doesn’t lead to long-form reading. There aren’t any comprehensive themes to build to for a satisfying conclusion. So, we might never be able to develop a thematic tie-in, but that doesn’t quell our desire to do what we do.  

In place of money, or any sort of career in this field, we would now love to hear some feedback from you, the reader. Do you like what we do, are there any standout articles as far as you’re concerned. If we were to compile a highlight compilation, what would you include? We know it sounds like we’re looking for praise here, but we would love to hear anything and everything from the silent majority of our readers who, generally speaking, don’t actively participate in content creators’ avenues.