Here are all of the David Wong articles on Cracked right now.

If you are a fan from the PWoT days, you’ll realize that many of my old articles have not made it over here yet. I still fantasize about uploading all of the old stuff, but new stuff keeps getting in the way and I have always tried to make new stuff the priority.

Anyway, if you’re reading this, it’s likely that you followed the link from Cracked.com because you tried to go to my former site, PointlessWasteofTime.com, and were redirected here. You are also apparently one of those readers who only showed up every 18 months or so, because I’ve been here a while.

But, I continue to get your confused emails so apparently there are a lot of you. Let me catch you up.

In the fall of 2007, I was running PointlessWasteofTime.com, and had been since 1999. I was doing about 6 million pageviews a month. I was working at an insurance company and barely making enough money to cover the rather large costs of hosting the site.

Bigger comedy site Cracked.com (doing about 10 million a month at the time), which is owned by an actual company with actual staff and stuff, was about to lose their Editor, Jay Pinkerton. Jay is my friend and has co-written a lot of stuff with me in the past. He was about to go off to work for Valve, writing video games for what I personally believe was a humongous amount of money.

Jay recommended me for the job and I got it. I became the editor, writing fart jokes from home full time, and as part of the deal Cracked bought PointlessWasteofTime.com from me. We merged the operations into one comedy megasite, bringing my articles, the Craption contest, and most importantly, the forums, on board.

A year and a half later, we’re doing about 50 million pageviews a month. More than triple what our sites were doing combined before the merger.

I still write an article every month or two, but I also have a hand in every single feature article that hits the front page (and we do one every single day, without fail, weekends and holidays included).

We have a unique process where all of the feature articles are written by strangers who wander in off the street. We have no writing staff. I run a writer’s room on the Cracked message boards (you can sign up HERE if you want in on it), which is a kind of workshop where we guide thousands of total strangers through the Cracked article writing process. From there, we’ve had 17 year-old kids come in and write articles that were read by more than a million human beings.

My side project, the horror novel John Dies at the End, is being released worldwide by St. Martin’s Press this September or thereabouts. We’re doing regular updates to the site in the mean time. You can also keep up with JDatE related stuff on Twitter:

http://www.twitter.com/johndiesattheen

As you can see I’ve done a poor job of keeping up the updates in this space. When we started this Cracked was doing 5 updates a week, now we’re doing about 20. We had about 100 people in the writer’s workshop then, now we have over 3,500. Each week we have meetings to discuss the fact that there isn’t nearly enough stuff on the site and try to think of ways to add more.

So time isn’t as easy to come by (that is, it’s currently 10:15 pm on a Wednesday night, and I still have one item left on my To-Do list… for Tuesday) and thus I’ve had to neglect this blog along with my marriage. 

But like I said if you feel like there’s not enough Wong in your life you can find me on the Cracked forums and writing Cracked articles and running the JDatE site with John and on MySpace and on Twitter and, come this Fall, in book stores everywhere.

That’s right, the man who had two friends through all of high school, who showed up to graduation and had several people express surprise because they thought I had moved away, has become a motherfucking self-promotion machine. If you need me to make an appearance at your ribbon cutting ceremony or van show, contact my agent. Yes, I have a goddamned agent.

The next update will be up as soon as Cracked hires me a blog ghost writer.

Well I bring this up three years later because this WIRED article about a guy who got rich selling virtual goods touches on the same point.

And it points out that the sale of in-game goods for real-world money is now a TWO BILLION DOLLAR INDUSTRY. Billion! Holy shit!

It’s here.

If you liked it, you can vote for it on Digg.

It’s not as paranoid as it sounds. Or maybe moreso.

Anyway, I have a new feature article Tuesday.

Also, events are happening over at JDATE:

http://www.johndiesattheend.com

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikedefiant/1459812703

The pit — lined with 15-30-centimeter (6-12-inch) metal spikes embedded in a concrete block — had been carefully hidden under leaves and branches in a park near Venlo, a town near the German border, police said.

“A person could fall into this, but also a dog, a child, people walking, bikers, motorcyclists — anybody,” police spokeswoman Nicole Theuns. She said the pit was about 1.5 meters (5 feet) deep and 80 centimeters (2 1/2 feet) wide.

The world is a fascinating place.