A Memorial For a Dear Friend

I am sorry if this blog post finds you unprepared, but recently we have lost a great man, an amazing husband, a caring dog dad, an incredibly talented writer, and a dear friend.

Matt Burroughs is no longer with us. I can assure you from my sources that there was no self harm or foul play involved in his loss. His heart just gave up while he was resting on the couch, embroiled in the prospect of what the upcoming adventures the weekend had in store for him. I’ll give you a minute to take a few deep breaths and compose yourself, it was an unexpected shock to me too. Take all the time you need.

Matt and I had dreams and aspirations of writing for cracked.com (not linking this site here because they are trash) during the heyday of online comedy writing in the mid 2010’s. At this time, Cracked had millions of views, shares, and visitors every day for the high quality articles they put out. They were one of the few places that online that paid and supported their writers well. All we wanted was be featured a few times on there and hopefully cut our teeth well enough to score a well-paying side gig that would satiate our desire for worldwide exposure and internet fame. At the time, I had been writing (poorly) on groovey.tv for a few months but I was having lots of trouble with their pirated wordpress formatting and wanted a better way to get my foot in the door. It was here at this intersection in our lives when Matt and I were destined to clumsily cross paths, searching for the key to finally join the coveted Internet Famous Writer’s Guild.

We, of course, were still too nervous and unprepared to give anyone a real submission, so we tried to circumvent this by joining forces with a featured Cracked writer who was branching out on her own (poplurker.com) to carve out her own little niche of pop culture infused internet comedy. We became part of a fun little writing group who had our very own online workshop, and we always supported each other with social media promotion whenever any of us would publish anything. This could have been as far as it went for Matt and I, but it would seem that the universe had other plans in store for us.

Thanks to forces beyond our control, the internet decided it would be fun to kill off the ad revenue for almost everything in 2017. YouTube revenue tanked, online websites faceplanted, and podcast payouts became non-existent. Cracked fired their entire staff on Christmas and reverted to paying a computer program to add two sentences to five stock photos and decided this was their hot new format. Loryn (the head of poplurker.com) decided to try her hand at other ventures and our scrappy little writer’s group became another casualty as well. We all floated around in the primordial soup of Twitter for a while, occasionally bumping into each other until the fateful day when I asked Matt if he wanted to still write, and if he did, if he would be willing to contribute to my shitty little website. I made sure to tell him it was a hot garbage site that I had started in order to publish the kind of idiotic content I wanted to see on the internet.

“But can I write…. smutty stuff?” he asked

“I guess, that will be ok as long as we can keep it at a PG-13 rating on our graphics and SEO blurbs” I stammered, wondering how that would look pasted next to 4,000 word articles about DDR songs.

And with that, Matthew took to his keyboard with fire of 1,000 suns in his fingertips, burning brightly. We published his first article in the summer of 2018 and the amount of feedback he got just seemed to ignite him to burn faster and hotter. He went crazy. He wrote reviews of internet smut several times a week. He was putting out so much smut-based content that it made it really hard to link stuff on my website without worrying that my dad or kids would stumble upon it and ask me what the alien-genitaled futa people were.

Matt’s propensity for naughty literature eventually ran out of steam (to this day I personally believe he ran out of smut to read on the internet) and he switched gears to try new and different article ideas. He used a character creator to build a funny 86 lb. MLB pitcher in The Show and wrote a bunch of funny episodes about this imaginary person’s life and upbringing and how he hated getting used as a towel in the locker room. He found a Civil War era cookbook and made terrible, terrible food with it. He wrote a veritable encyclopedia of racing content. He reviewed over 380 different flavors of Mtn Dew and even baked with our favorite corn syrup treat.

He had found his place and his voice. I was blessed to have such awesome content flourishing on my site around all the stuff I wrote about stupid niche crap. He always had such a great take on things, and reviewed everything that came across his desk with a sense of fairness and balance. He was getting so many product review requests he could barely keep up with them all. He grew our brand and online presence with great skill and scope. He would go onto the horrible place known as reddit to post my articles in hopes of impressing the hordes of self-fellating cousin fuckers that make up reddit. This always ended badly, but I still appreciate him trying to expose my work to new groups of people. He was brave and selfless like that. If you look at ANY of his online profiles, they are all adorned lovingly in tons of tehben.com splash and graphics. He was an amazing brand ambassador who was truly proud of all the work we had produced together.

Over the years, Matt and I dealt with armies of internet trolls, had to cancel and remove sex pests’ content reviews, fought copyright scumbags, dealt with scary lawsuits, and responded to a multitude of general threats that had all spawned directly from the dumbass content that we produced. While some of these moments were absolutely unbearable, we also learned a lot about the business and how to approach things from a smarter (i.e. less litigious) angle. Matt even got really good at proofing my work, and was well versed in carefully shooting down certain “aspects” of my article writing skills

“I’m not sure if that sexual Pokemon GIF is appropriate for an article on silkscreening, buddy” he would send me in text. And he would always be right.

So yeah, we were both a couple of Cracked rejects trying to make our way in the world by producing a LOT of free content for the masses, but during this time we also became really good friends as well. He was always there to lend a sympathetic ear, and we leaned on each other a lot through life’s ups and downs. We may have been separated by a huge landmass known as thu second ‘mendment states uf ‘murica, but despite our physical distance, we always felt close and I will always value his friendship.

Matthew was a MASSIVE racing fan who often was at a racetrack of any variety every weekend. He loved dirt racing, track racing, NASCAR, F1 Racing and iRacing. If it involved a motor, a frame and four wheels it was safe to assume he was already there. He covered plenty of these events here on tehben.com and he would use my reading comprehension as “idiot scaling” to make sure that his racing content was accessible and understandable to anybody that was not well versed or involved in the sport. I would ask him questions about certain rules and he would go back and spell out the basics despite knowing that all the extra wording and definitions would annoy his hardcore fans. The man lived and breathed for the primal competition of man and machine vs. man and machine. His massive online racing community he crafted will immediately miss all of his great commentary on Twitter, with some of his real-time reactions reaching huge numbers and audiences. Matt was a guy who knew his stuff and was clever enough to make some hilarious observations in a timely manner.

Matt also loved baseball, video games and Mtn. Dew. He introduced me to how awesome baseball is and how fun it is to enjoy at the ballpark. I even bought a copy of The Show so we could play online against each other, pitting his lanky stringbean pitcher against my squat little portly Neanderthal man who would often pass out before reaching first base. We never got a chance to publish our crossover with those freaks, but the few games we played against each other were some of the funniest moments I’ve ever had playing games online. Matt would always get so pissed off whenever would ask him to explain to me what an “infield fly rule is”, and to this day I still have no idea what that is.

I may not be the most verbose person, and I do tend to use a lot of colorful language inappropriately but I am still having trouble putting my thoughts, gratitude, and sadness into words properly. Matthew touched us all and was well-liked and revered by everyone that was blessed enough to cross his path. He was an unabashed ally to the LGBTQ+ community, and would stand up for the oppressed long before society got their act together. He even started an awesome series on why women fans are so important to NASCAR. He was like the little videogame character that would always take the path of the paragon when presented with a choice. He had a great moral compass, and treated everyone he met with dignity and respect. That is, until you made a tasteless Dale Jr. joke, and then he was finna get your ass.

I am the both the steward and curator of the tireless and expansive body of creative work that Matt has put out over the last five years. I’m not taking this role lightly and I am not going to edit or remove any of his content, leaving everything here as it is. I highly recommend clicking over to the right on his icon and help yourself to reading any of his articles when you feel alone or miss him. That’s his genuine voice right there, soothing and reassuring you that he was having a great time in this world while also leaving a legacy for you to enjoy whenever you want to. I promise it’s all gonna be here as long as I can keep it going.

Matt, you were loved by so many people and communities that your loss will send reverberating shockwaves for a long time to come. I miss your funny little Saturday night texts and all the fun we had building this disturbing little place on the internet together. I just hope that someday we will meet again and you will tell me at great length how good the Mtn. Dew Heaven Edition is.

I love you and will miss you my dear friend.