From the shared desk of Joe Anderson and Mike Haverty:

For clarification's sake, I am writing this as Joe Anderson and not Mr. Jones. Doing this puts me at a moral crossroads because I feel blogging about anything that falls into the realm of my personal life puts me one step away from just posting pictures of my niece with captions that read "LOOK HOW CUTE WE ARE!!!"

I would also like to point out I used the term "blogging." I very much hate the word but at the end of the day, the Survival Guide is just another humor blog.

Much like how Family Ties had that very special episode where Michael J. Fox gets addicted to diet pills, you can consider this post the Guide's equivalent.

Last Friday marked the 156th post, which marks completion of a full content year. We started this a summer ago as a pet project and in the preceding year churned out sizeable amount of content. Some of which was good. Some...not. In fact, one of my favorite games to play consists of picking a random week of posts and see if the median quality of the posts falls into the category of "solid" or "were we even fucking trying?"

Shortly after we started, I talked to Mike about the guide format getting old. To be honest, I had fear of having the wheels fall off the wagon. Although some could argue there was never a wagon in the first place, or if there was one, it didn't have wheels to begin with. Or, better yet, we had a wagon with wheels, but it never achieved forward movement so it would be inherently impossible for the wheels to fall off a stationary vehicle as a result of movement. Or something.

We love the Guide. We love the fact it forces us to churn out content three days a week and we love the fact some poor bastard came across our site when he Googled manatee vagina not once, but twice. We love it so much that Mike and I will bicker like some same sex parents about it. I will wake up to text messages on my phone about how I need to get my posts up earlier and I will send him an angry email back that has some quip about his hilarious inability to proofread and then he, in turn, will point out that half the time I write posts that aren't even guides to anything, and then I'll point out that the post about Mr. Jones's sexual experiences with a black woman was fucking hilarious and then he'll agree that it was funny but then he'll impatiently ask me what is the point of calling it a guide when some of the shit I write, fake as it may be, cannot even be construed as guide.

Then he will let it go because he fears conflict and I will silently consider myself the victor because I am a smug asshole as it relates to creative endeavors. Then, two glorious weeks later, the cycle continues.

Starting next week Monday, we want to try something new. We want an honest-to-God narrative thread because that affords us the luxury of character development. We chose to make our aliases characters for a reason, but (although we have certainly tried) we could not bring the characters out in the writing.

Not only that, but a coherent narrative arc will force Mike and I to collaborate. In it's current form, the guide is very much "Joe posts. Then Mike posts. Then Joe posts." Although we both are probably collaborating in some sense of the word, it is collaborating the same way two people playing adjacent Pac-Man machines is considered collaborating. Sure, we both are trying for the same goal, and we are more than willing to give each other some tips to get those fruits and eventual key, but at the end of the day we're still playing our own game.

This new narrative will be told from the perspectives of not only Mr. Jones and Leon Firestone, but as well other people they meet on their overseas journey for academic validation.

If that premise seems cryptic and haunting, rest assured it only seems that way because we are crippled underneath the weight of possibility and potential failure.