Before I got promoted somehow and when I was editor of the funny ha-ha section of my newspaper, I was required to come up with more garbage to put on my page than just a column. It wasn't that I had trouble filling all the space with my columns, as some of my long-ass articles here will illustrate. It's just that nobody really wants to sit through 1,800 of my gibberish; even I know that's a bit much. So aside from my column and the stuff other people did, I would always have a small chunk of space left that I didn't want to waste. Eventually I filled those spaces by telling people to send in doodles they drew during their classes (which worked all gangbusters) but prior to that I wrote helpful hints.
Helpful hints were very useful; they were fake, short advice tips that were, and make sure to note the qualifier, supposed to be funny. They were useful because I could just write a bunch of them, and since I never knew how much space I was going to have left after laying out the rest of the page I could always just write a few more or take a few out. Also, they were a lot less wordy than my long-ass and convoluted columns full of confusing syntax, which is also a plus because that meant more people would want to read them.
And now that you know the story, here are some of the helpful hints that I wrote. If I ever write any more of them, for fun or for some other bizarre reason, I will also post them here. But that probably won't happen.
