April Fools Site: OoaT Subscriptions

Posted April 1, 2010, 12:01 a.m.

On April Fools Day 2010, Off on a Tangent displayed with a modified template that asked users to purchase a site subscription. All content was cut-off after some introductory text and then had a notice asking users to subscribe to read the rest. The announcement read as-follows:

Get Your OoaT Subscription Today!

Effective today, I am instituting a premium subscription system for Off on a Tangent. If you want to gain access to some of the quality content on this website, please consider purchasing an Off on a Tangent subscription. Prices start at only $75/year! This is much less than some of our competitors, and I think [ . . . ]

Clicking on the various subscription links gave you this information:

Some Off on a Tangent content is available only to paying subscribers. Subscribers receive:

High quality news, opinion, and creative content from Scott Bradford.

No more ‘nag screens.’

Good ‘mojo’ from supporting the independent media.

A free subscribers’ gift*!

If you want to join the Off on a Tangent community and support quality, independent media, please consider subscribing. Subscription plans start as low as $75/year.

$75/year unlimited access†.

$95/year news and reviews access.

$150/year unlimited access.

$200/year premium access.

Unlimited access plans unlock the entire Off on a Tangent site with no restrictions whatsoever.

News and reviews plans unlock breaking news, news opinion, and product/media reviews. Fiction, poetry, and other miscellaneous content is not included.

Premium access plans provide all-access rights to Off on a Tangent, including everything in the ‘unlimited’ plan plus publish rights! You can contribute your own content to the Off on a Tangent community!

To subscribe, please contact me directly with a 250 word essay describing why you would like to be an Off on a Tangent subscriber!

* Free gift is available to unlimited and premium subscribers; gift may be made from pipe cleaners and snot.
† $75/year unlimited plan requires 25-year subscription contract and 10-years prepayment.

Click to see how it looked!

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.

Quotes

The world stands by balanced antagonisms.

Hating life, despising life—even for the genuine pain that life inflicts—merely serves to make life itself worse, unbearably worse.

The very idea of converting what was formerly a confederation to a consolidated government is totally subversive of every principle which has hitherto governed.

It cannot be absolutely or generally affirmed that the greatest danger of the present age is license or tyranny, anarchy or despotism. Both are equally to be feared. . . .

Whenever anything disagreeable or displeasing happens to you, remember Christ crucified and be silent.

Not the perversities of others, not their sins of commission or omission, but his own misdeeds and negligences should a sage take notice of.

But if there really be anything of the nature of progress, it must mean, above all things, the careful study and assumption of the whole of the past.

People enjoy helping when they can, it is part of human nature. But when people are forced to pay heavy taxes to finance entitlement programs, food stamps, and welfare, they hate it.

Money often costs too much.

A constitution is a compact of a people with their rulers; if the rulers break the compact, the people have a right and ought to remove them and do themselves justice.

Left entirely to men, the church ought to have perished at many points in her long history.

The emotions of oratory have been worn down through long years of overuse.

Any man who preaches real love is bound to beget hate. It is as true of democratic fraternity as a divine love; sham love ends in compromise and common philosophy; but real love has always ended in bloodshed.

In a word, the true morality of Christianity is love. And love does admittedly run counter to self-seeking—it is an exodus out of oneself, and yet this is precisely the way in which man comes to himself.

The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane.

One can shuffle inanimate objects around; one can compel individuals to be at certain places at certain times; but one can hardly compel individuals to put forward their best efforts.

The tragedy in all of this is the simple fact that the average tax-paying American was not given an honest and genuine choice. The voter finds himself enduring one party long enough to witness a whole series of travesties and then switches to the other party thinking he will get a substantial reversal of policy. But he doesn’t.

One of the pressures on governments . . . is to ‘do something’—even when there is nothing they can do that is likely to make things better and much that they can do that will risk making things worse.

Salvation, while personal, is not private. To be incorporated into Christ is to be incorporated into his Church. You cannot sunder the two: it is not two in any case. It is one thing.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.