Big changes are here!

It’s official: We’re not a blog anymore.

If you’ve been reading this site for a while, you’ve probably already noticed the change in format over the last few years.

For starters, articles have been showing up on an actual schedule instead of whenever I felt like hammering something out at 2 AM after a night of drinking.

Think of the last few years as a test run, gradually building up to the new version of the site that you see now. This is the version of the site that I’ve always envisioned in my head, and now it’s finally a reality.

For years, AngryJerk.net was basically a blog run by an angry jerk (weird, huh?). It was a relic of the early internet, with random posts, inconsistent quality, heavy bursts of activity followed by months (or years) of silence, and a whole lot of posts that seemed like a good idea at the time but aged like milk.

Some of it worked, but honestly, a lot of it didn’t. The site never really grew, and both readership and my writing skills stagnated.

Now we’re doing this the right way.

AngryJerk.net has moved to a magazine-style format with an actual publishing schedule (hence the name “AJnet Magazine”). That means different types of content on different days, multiple writers, and a system that doesn’t rely on one guy trying to do everything himself and burning out after a few months.

Going forward, there will be regular updates on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. There are also future plans for Tuesday and Thursday updates. Previously, updates were scheduled to post at 3 AM EST. Articles will now post at 9 AM EST.

The layout is cleaner, and so is the writing. Don’t worry, we’re not “going corporate” or anything like that. We’re just refining ourselves. There’s a difference between being raw and being sloppy, and I let things stay sloppy for way longer than I should have. The “new” writing style is a combination of my professional voice and my older tone, so it might seem jarring to some of you at first. I promise you’ll get used to it.

Our recurring features are changing too, but not drastically.

I always felt that the Reddit Revues were a little too long and drawn out, so we’ll be making those a little shorter. We’ve also come up with a template of sorts, so the articles should be a little easier on your eyes.

It’s only taken us about two years, but we’ve also come up with a better name for the Battlestation Reviews. Going forward, the Battlestation Reviews will be called Battlestation Breakdown.

The AJnet Battle Arena, which currently only has two articles, is now AJnet Fight Night. I’m looking forward to doing more of these, I think they’re pretty fun.

Going forward, we’ll no longer be accepting guest articles. We received a grand total of four guest submissions since we started accepting them two years ago. While we appreciate the submissions we did receive, we’ve got more than enough writers now, so we don’t need to rely on reader submissions for content. The good news is, anyone who wants to submit a rant to us can still do so over at our sister site, Rantlister, under the iRant feature. See this page for more information.

We’re also cleaning up the old material.

I’ll be blunt here: The old stuff sucks. Looking back at some of this stuff, calling it “rough” would be an understatement. A lot of it’s just downright bad. It’s poorly written garbage, rushed and posted without a second thought. We’ll be fixing up some of the better old articles, archiving others, and even deleting some.

We also have to go through the images and clean those up too, lest we invoke the wrath of any more copyright trolls. Some images may have to be deleted or replaced. Don’t blame us, our lawyers are making us do it.

This conveniently ties into our plans for the AJnet Archives.

Previously, I used the AJnet Archives to repost and analyze old articles that were removed or unfinished.

Going forward, everything from before the change will be getting filed under the AJnet Archives. Every once in a while, we’ll go back, pull something out of the archive, and take a fresh look at it. We’ll see what holds up and what doesn’t, and I’ll try to figure out what the hell I was thinking at the time. Kind of like what we were doing before, except now we have a larger pool of material to work with.

If you haven’t seen it at the bottom of the articles already, we’re also rolling out a weekly mailing list to make it easier to keep up with everything in one place. You don’t have to join Substack or pay anything to sign up, just enter your email and you’re in. Jackie, our social media manager, will be the one running it. She’ll send out one email a week on Saturday mornings with a quick rundown of everything we posted.

Like I said before, the “online magazine” thing was something I’ve envisioned for a while. I originally tried to do something like this back in 2014 with a site called I’m Feeling Frosty. This failed mostly because I was trying to do everything myself. That simply doesn’t work for something as big as a magazine. On top of that, I was drinking too much, partying too much, and generally not in any position to build something consistent. It’s no mystery why it fell apart so quickly.

I started making the plans to try this with AngryJerk.net in 2022.

I was working a miserable, boring job at a medical manufacturing company, and during that time I put a lot of thought into how I could up my game and grow this site into something more than just a blog with a bunch of random and stupid posts. I wanted something sustainable and structured, something that could actually last and I could be proud of.

A lot of this site was planned on that company’s time rather than working hard, so in a weird way they were early financial backers of AJnet Magazine. Thanks for your generous contribution, assholes.

We’ve spent the last few years building this behind the scenes, figuring out the structure, locking in the voices, and coming up with new features. And now we’re actually executing it. AJnet is officially in the publication game now.

Fear not, we’re still willing to say the things that others don’t have the balls to say, but now we have style and class—okay, maybe not class. But we’ve definitely got style.

Prepare yourselves, because we’re just getting started.

Angry_Jerk

Adam “The Angry Jerk” Baker is the CEO of The AJnet Organization and Editor-in-Chief of AJnet Magazine. A grizzled internet veteran of over 20 years, he writes about politics, culture, and whatever else manages to annoy him that day.

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