Aaron Reynolds
@aaronreynolds
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Following
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Definitely not the children's author. I write @effinbirds . Buy my new playing cards:
Toronto, Ontario
Joined July 2008
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Pinned Tweet
I was thinking about the most offensive job offer I have ever received, that I never tweeted about because they had me sign an NDA before we talked about it.
But I just went back and read the NDA and it says I was supposed to be paid for my time and I never was, so…
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I’ve started a new evening ritual: I leave all my technology inside except my Walkman, and I get into the hammock in the back yard and listen to an album from start to finish.
My cat has been curious about this new habit, and I’ve been trying to coax him into the hammock —
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Anyways that’s the story of the time I ghosted Netflix
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This is what it’s like to get texts from my fourteen year old while driving.
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Yes, I came home from an eye exam and they put in the drops where you can’t see for a few hours and I thought I was letting in the cat but I let in a groundhog who ate all the cat food and wouldn’t leave. He came back to the door every day for a week and I never told my wife why.
@aaronreynolds
You’d think you would have learned from the groundhog incident! (That was you, right? Was it a groundhog, or some other urban beast?)
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I have just invited a raccoon into the hammock with me and the raccoon has obliged.
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I dunno man, some highly paid executives are pretty sure I’m only worth $200 a week
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holy shit my DMs from people who also didn’t take this job
I feel like Netflix thought there were people out there who watched a lot of Netflix and who were already tweeting funny things “for free” who would be thankful to get any money at all for what they were already doing.
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I went to Sheridan College for photography, and the most valuable part of that program for me was learning to value my time, in a professional sense. There was an instructor named Peter who drilled into us that the only thing that mattered was the cost of our time —
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The raccoon is outside in what I assume is now his hammock.
I am inside on the couch with ice on my groin because I definitely pulled something.
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I got to wondering what cartoon I wrote after I received the email with the $200-a-week offer (because what I always do to cope with frustration is make a cartoon). So I checked the date stamps on the emails and then looked up what I posted the next day.
Checks out.
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— and that if we discounted it we were not just screwing ourselves, but every other photographer out there by driving prices down.
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The raccoon stares at me for a while. Like, “you invited me up here, now what”
Now what indeed
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It’s winter, I’m in Montréal, it’s time for my annual favourite joke.
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They wanted 8-10 high quality pitches per week, two of which they would want expanded and fleshed out or even fully scripted, for $200.
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Here is my second miscalculation of the evening: as I take my weight off of the hammock, the raccoon starts to slide towards the middle.
I am straddling the hammock and the raccoon is sliding straight at my crotch and all I can think of is the laser scene in Goldfinger.
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This role would require watching seasons of television programs every week to generate informed, relevant pitches about them… for $200.
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I shout something, maybe “Christ”? I don’t know. The raccoon also makes a kind of disgruntled old man noise that probably means the same thing.
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Thing is, I was already driving that train! This happened after I got my US book deal and quit my day job. I was doing Effin’ Birds half the week and was creative director of a podcast network the other half.
@aaronreynolds
Yeah well look at you now driving the No Regerts train through down town Fuck Youville
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In my continuing efforts to make social media less of a hellscape, I bought a James Bond action figure and am giving him friends and adventures.
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Finally, the pay rate comes through, and get this: it’s $200 a week.
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Anyways at this point I’m relatively sure that I don’t want the job. If this is what it’s like to find out what it pays, how hard must it be to get paid, right? Who wants that hassle.
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They really tried hard to not tell me about the money. It depends on a lot of things! We pay more if we like the ideas! You’ll be flown out to California sometimes for meetings!
I wanted to say “I can’t buy food with a trip to California” but I held my tongue.
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Know what should have been a big red flag? The number of times I asked for a pay range for the role and got a dodge instead of an answer.
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So I got a DM here on Twitter. An org that did not want to reveal who they were liked my writing and my social media presence. They had a pop culture positivity-centric project and they wanted to know if I was interested in writing for it.
I was definitely curious!
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And I think they missed that a lot of people who do this “for free” use those tweets exactly the way Netflix wanted to: to draw attention to other things that they are doing, as viral advertisements.
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Now that they’d seen my resume, they were ready to have me do the writing test.
No, I still need a pay range here. I’m not doing all this work without knowing if I’m interested in the role.
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One of the things is a lengthy writing test that requires the watching of multiple episodes of multiple TV programs.
I’m no sucker — this writing test is 100% the job they want done. So I circle back to pay.
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I do a profoundly inelegant dismount, bringing one leg up way too high to get it over the raccoon and end up falling on the ground.
The raccoon looks down at me from the hammock. He grunts. He settles in.
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I sent a really chipper “oh, I didn’t send you a resume, you asked if I was interested in this job because you liked my work!”
But whatever, I made the guy a resume highlighting all the relevant achievements and skills from my bizarre career.
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He CCs the execs on his answer, bouncing the question to them.
I get the kind of blowback I expected: an exec demanding to see my resume and acting generally offended that I’m making this about money.
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I recognize that the main email chain is now filled with executives from this org, so I go back to the original guy who reached out to me and restate my interest and try to back channel a pay range discussion.
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The project was secret-secret because the org wanted to keep it feeling organic and like it sprang fully formed from them. Thus the NDA.
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And to my delight, he decides to climb into the hammock! Except not in a very cat-like way. Huh.
At this point I should let you know that my backyard is very dark and I don’t see well.
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I chuckle a little. The raccoon doesn’t like this noise. Or he doesn’t like the sliding, or both. He tries to turn around and climb back to his end of the hammock but instead now I’m straddling the raccoon like I’m playing horsey with it.
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So I very slowly put one foot down and then the other on either side of the hammock and slowly try to stand up. I’m maintaining eye contact with the raccoon as if my life depends on it.
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Anyways they keep pushing the NDA so we can talk more, and I sign it. Now suddenly a bunch more people are CCed on the emails and they all have things they’d like me to do.
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Tonight was some Rolling Stones — I’ve never really given them a fair shake, so I’m working through the Stones in Mono box set — and like clockwork, my big grey lump of a cat shows up. I make some space and start patting the hammock and asking him to jump up —
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when I hear “we need to move on,” I automatically translate it to “it is inconvenient for me that you won’t forget the bad thing I did to you”
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The dedication in the front of the
@EffinBirds
book may be the best thing I have ever written.
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IN A WORLD WHERE THEY DIGITALLY REMOVED HENRY CAVILL’S MUSTACHE
ONE MAN
DID THE OPPOSITE
#MustacheLeague
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@rstevens
every day someone in my DMs says they can make me a millionaire with NFTs and I reply with the Telegraph article where I shit talk NFTs. Invariably they say they can’t read it because it’s paywalled. I reply “you’re so rich from NFTs that you can’t afford $4” and they block me
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Me, a person with too many notebooks:
I should deal with these complex emotions by buying more notebooks
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How do I convince my publisher that this is an essential marketing purchase
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@amandadeibert
@CatStaggs
Big legacy media organization asked me for pitches to revitalize their social media, I pitched them
@EffinBirds
. They hated it so much that I was determined to make it more popular than their org. It has 25x more followers than their brand, and now this:
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@jennifer_cesare
The 40th anniversary Walkman is adorable and silly. And a good high-end music player.
Also it has a screensaver of tapes, labelled with whatever you’re listening to.
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Had a little moment just now where I remembered how much I loved the Hobby Show in Toronto.
Picture ComicCon. Now add model trains and remote controlled boats. AND comics. AND prop vendors — to this day I regret not buying an Aliens pulse rifle cast from the original prop.
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HOLY HELL IT JUST KEEPS GETTING WORSE. This article is a ride and a half.
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After six films I think we all have to concede that these missions are, in fact, possible.
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True story: I was writing Effin’ Birds in my backyard while listening to music and my neighbour called out over the fence that my music choice sucked and whoops guess who got immortalized on Effin’ Birds
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I feel like every few minutes the camera pulls back and reveals another two seats at the ever expanding pundit table on CBC. I’m expecting Margaret Atwood and the Littlest Hobo next.
#ELXN43
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I started playing Animal Crossing and WHAT THE FUCK, YOU START THIS GAME IN DEBT TO FUCKING RACCOONS??
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great work everybody
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This one star Amazon review of my book is my new favourite thing.
“There are beautiful books out there about birds and this is not one of them”
holy shit I love this so much
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So Instagram has been emailing
@EffinBirds
every other day for a week to fill out a survey. I finally did it today.
First question: gender
Second question: age
As soon as I select “over 40” I get the THANK YOU, YOUR ANSWERS HAVE BEEN RECORDED screen and the survey is done.
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Or they read it and figured they could solve the problem with math
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HI I AM DOING THE TAXES FOR EFFIN’ BIRDS AND LET ME TELL YOU HOW HARD IT IS TO EXPLAIN THESE EXPENSES
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That “terrible idea” known as
@EffinBirds
, the one critics have referred to as “sad and contrived” and “low-effort garbage,” is 83 followers away from 150,000.
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A guy on Twitter who was mad at the thought that his kid might stumble across my book in a bookstore called it “a form of pollution” and we put that on the back cover of my next book.
compliments aside for a moment: what's your favourite *insult* you've ever received?
On the subway, this guy a few seats over looked at me then said to his friend "why do all these gamer girls look like Skrillex, man?"
To this day it gives me joy every time I think of it.
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Today’s train is filled with old people who have a lot of complaints about problems they are making for themselves. I haven’t read any of my book because they are providing such amazing entertainment.
#traintweets
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Anyways, that’s the story of how a bunch of adults who should have known better tried to make twelve year old Aaron have less fun and instead led to me having way more fun.
Because if it’s a movie set then the Batmobile can totally be coming out of this hill under this mansion.
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Me: signs a contract that gives me a really short amount of time to write a really large number of
@EffinBirds
cartoons
Also me: immediately writes Effin’ Birds cartoon about the situation
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So uh I’m about to see how fast I can get kicked out of a virtual event
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Seriously, though, carry this with you into 2020
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Today a drunk man on a park bench gestured at my NASA jacket and yelled “DID YOU GO INTO SPACE?”
“No,” I replied.
“So why are you wearin’ a SPACE JACKET?” he yelled with a smirk.
I pointed at his cap. “Did you play for the Yankees?” I asked.
He got up and left the park.
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Here is why
@EffinBirds
has a LinkedIn presence: because the buttsticks over there react as if Effin’ Birds posts are factual pronouncements, and it is FUNNY AS HELL to me.
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I got a spam email that said Effin’ Birds’ site was doing poorly on search ranking, offering me a free analytics report, so I said sure, I’d love to see it.
The keywords in the report are glorious nonsense. Apparently I rank very low on searches for “Vin Diesel Snapchat code”.
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Someone is trying to beat the heat in the shade of my chimney.
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Some dude in Effin’ Birds’ Instagram comments has been trying to pick a fight with me for seven straight hours.
Joke’s on him: after his first comment this morning I put him on “restricted” — which means no one else sees his comments. He’s been shouting into the void ALL DAY.
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This is your annual reminder that one of my wife’s cousins is named Sam Serif and my wife does not understand why I find his name so profoundly hilarious.
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So, that revolution in the train club?
Turns out for years these fun stealers had been forcing changes on other people’s sections of track, and I inadvertently gave them ALL a way out: tiny movie company signs.
I printed dozens of them. We used them to counter every complaint.
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Pro-tip: if you want to keep something a secret from your wife, don’t make a viral thread about it
Yes, I came home from an eye exam and they put in the drops where you can’t see for a few hours and I thought I was letting in the cat but I let in a groundhog who ate all the cat food and wouldn’t leave. He came back to the door every day for a week and I never told my wife why.
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Whenever I work outside there’s this bee that tries to climb into my coffee cup. I have always been irritated by it, trying to swat it away.
Today I poured a second cup for it and it is happily leaving mine alone.
Did I just make friends with a bee
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someone introduced me to Anil Dash here at the Webbys
I’m wearing a shirt that says FUCK NFTs
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I built a detailed little downtown cityscape with restaurants and apartments, but then I bought a bag of rubber animals that were much too large and had them ransacking the city.
The octopus on top of the apartment building, clutching a Volkswagen, he was my favourite.
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I can’t believe I did this.
Through an afternoon of careful testing, I have determined that Instagram will let you curse in an advertisement if you commit to spending $1000.
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@GraceSpelman
I changed my manager’s contact picture in my phone to Roosevelt Franklin from Sesame Street. Six months later he called me for the first time and I laughed so hard that I couldn’t answer the phone.
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My mother in law bought some pyjamas online for my youngest kid, but it turns out that despite being from a children’s brand and definitely a design for children, the XL they sent was not a child’s XL.
So now I have dinosaur jammies.
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this joke brought to you by my old age
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Idle thought: I wonder what it would cost to emblazon the
@EffinBirds
Eat Farts eagle as an outfield wall advertisement in an MLB stadium this year
Because theoretically I have an advertising budget
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🎶 To all the dudes I’ve blocked before
🎵 You can’t tweet at me any more
🎶 Your opinions were all wrong
🎵 I dedicate this song
🎶 To all the dudes I’ve blocked before 🎶
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some dingus on on the elephant site was giving me a hard time for not abandoning Effin' Birds' 300K followers on here to post solely on Mastodon
like, look guy, I'm not in the nose cutting off for the purpose of face spiting business
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I have outdone myself.
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Hey remember when I stopped making
@GIFpocalypse
because it was too dark and bad for my own mental health
Maybe I’ll start making GIFpocalypse again
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Called FedEx to pre-pay the duty on a shipment of new
@EffinBirds
merchandise. FedEx agent checks the cargo description. FedEx agent has not been able to stop laughing through the rest of our call.
“30 years doing this job and I have never seen a manifest like this,” he says.
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