One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

Despair, Inc. is going to buy one of my ideas!!! No fucking shit, for real. I’m in a total state of disbelief.

And it happened all because of Lowtax.

Fuck this, I can’t believe it. Begin e-mai;

Hi there:

My name is Justin Sewell. I work at Despair.com. We are a small
parody publisher, and one of the products lines we publish are
parodies of motivational posters. You can browse through the
designs at http://www.despair.com/indem.html.

We recently were shown a batch of really funny parodies of motivational
posters from SomethingAwful’s site- created by users during a photoshop
contest.

A couple of them really caught our attention, because they seemed
like they’d be good fits for our line. You were the author of
one of those designs, called “Potential” (showing a bunch of
french fries).

I wanted to contact you to see if you would be interested in selling
the rights to us for that. On the occasion that we’ve bought
sayings from others, we’ve paid $500 upfront for the assignment
rights. In addition, we provide the author with 100 notecards
bearing their quote and 20 lithographs (posters) if we opt to
produce lithographs. (In the case of your “Potential” quote,
I’m very certain we would do lithographs).

We had offered to pay SomethingAwful a fee for putting us in touch
with the authors of the designs we liked- but they asked us to
instead give their portion to the individuals we were contacting.
So this would mean that instead of paying $500, we’d be paying you
$750. (The person who proposed this was Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka,
if you want to thank him.)

Anyway, I wanted to throw that offer out there. We’re actually
very near to closing out our 2004 collection. We have 12 designs,
but I would really like to get your “Potential” quote in the
collection if you’re amenable to it- just because most of the
new designs in the 2004 collection use positive titles (something
pretty new for us) and it is a perfect fit.

Please let me know if you’d be interested in this arrangement. If
so, we’d send you an assignment agreement - basically a contract
that you can sign and fax to us. Then we’d fed-ex your check for
$750 out, and, when we had printed products, we’d mail you your
free pieces.

cheers,
Justin Sewell
Despair, Inc.