For nearly two years now, I’ve been “working” for a semi-legitimate film-criticism website that has, so far, earned me a broken computer that I can’t fix (which was supposed to be a bribe that I could either use myself or sell on eBay—hard to do either when I can’t make it work). In my defense, I don’t do that much work for it, and when I do it’s pretty much self-satisfying. In the beginning, the guy who runs it would send me the shit cluttering his desk, which nobody else wanted, and I’d happily review it. I haven’t done that in a year; he still sends me the clutter, but I don’t review it.

For nearly two years now, I’ve done glorified volunteer work on a former college professor’s film site. It started as a pretty basic thing—he needed someone to help him post reviews once a week; in exchange for that, I got free screeners and the opportunity to have published reviews in a semi-legitimate location—but gradually I wormed my way up to a full-fledged web guru, spending a shitload of time using my limited web-design knowledge to bring the site into the 21st century.

Despite the lack of substantial payment, I’ve found the work rewarding enough to not bail. I mean, there are a lot of things I look to get out of the experience, and as long as I get a few of them, I’ll be okay for awhile.

And then The Webmaster sent me an e-mail that made my brain explode.

For nearly a year now, I’ve been writing a weekly column about television. Similar to Zap2It’s TV Gal, but way less retarded, it’s basically an uncompromising look at the TV shows I waste my time watching. It’s not a big thing; mostly, it exists to lend enough legitimacy to myself to apply for the TCA, get in, get invited to the upfronts, then hobnob until I can get a good job and shake off the dust of this shitty review website. It’s a sound plan.

Now, I’ve mentioned this site and the occasional run–insI’ve had with the site founder, but man did he rile me up last week—and he tried again this week.

Here’s the deal: this is the first free time I’ve had since my last post. Now, I had some free time prior to that post, but not much. The combination of work and my own writing led me to abandon you, lovely readers, and then, approximately 30 seconds after I published the last post, a deluge of horrible scripts forced me to work, on average, 850 hours over the past 10 days. I have not had time to do anything that I enjoy. Okay, technically I enjoy scripts, but only when they’re good, and of the 738,243 scripts I’ve read this year, four of them have been good, and one of those was not a script I read for work.

In other words, over the past 10 days I’ve been busy exclusively with work, but over the past few months, I’ve divided my time between an increasingly busy work schedule and writing projects that I hope, someday, will lead to me getting paid. That’s the key part of the story I’m about to tell: I need money, and I’m sick of doing shit for free. You guys are lucky I need to vent, or I would have abandoned this blog two years ago.

Hey, remember The Webmaster? Good, because I…basically forgot about him. Per that last entry, we left off with me deciding I’d wait a week before asking him to remove all my content, plus my login/password, and then I’d post them all here. That was on May 2nd, and I haven’t posted any of that stuff here. Why? I…basically forgot. That, I guess, illustrates how much that crappy film-review site means to me in the here and now.

Thankfully, my friend Mark decided to jog my memory by e-mailing me a Craigslist posting featuring the following hi-larious “job posting,” written by The Webmaster:

[Website name redacted] is looking for interns to review films and TV shows on DVD then write reviews. There also exists opportunities to attend press screenings and perform interviews with filmmakers and celebrities via telephone or one-on-one.

This is part-time work which typically only takes up roughly three to four hours of your time per project.

This is a non-paying internship.

Anyone who tells you they can make money off the web is either lying to you or does not understand how the web works. Only a handful of sites make any real money. We have been in business online for 13 years and have yet to make a profit. We do this because we love what we do, and you should, too.

If you’re interested, send writing sample and level of interest. Be honest; if you cannot meet deadlines then you probably should not try this – deadlines are a part of any writing job.

Bitter? Nah…