Click Picks is a new online-exclusive column in which Lara Taylor Strayer will profile interesting Web sites for the Temple community. Look for her column every two weeks.
If you’ve had a bad day, visit FMyLife.com instead of Ben and Jerry for an emotional booster, and you’ll be feeling better by following just two simple steps.
Step One: Post the details of your bad day to get out your anger.
Step Two: Read hundreds of other posts for a good laugh.
“Today, I was at a Chinese restaurant. I’d forgotten my glasses and had a migraine. I was straining my eyes, squinting and rubbing my temples to alleviate my migraine. I was kicked out of the restaurant and banned henceforth because my waitress thought I was mocking her eyes. FML,” one post reads.
After skimming through posts on the home page, readers can give each post one of two votes: “I agree, your life is f***ed” or “you deserved that one.” Using these votes, the Web sites categorizes the posts into Top FMLs and Flop FMLs, each of which you can visit by clicking separate links.
Visitors can also “moderate” FMLs. It is the same idea, but this way, readers can choose which FMLs are seen on the Web site. According to the site, moderating “help us make the best choice when it comes to choosing which FML should be published.”
“A good FML should be authentic, well written and make you laugh without being too shocking,” creators also say.
To further narrow down the search for the funniest stories, the site also has categorizes each story based on its topic: love, money, work, kids, health, sex and miscellaneous.
FMyLife.com is a relatively new site. The site has been running on its current condition with an official name and user account system for only a little more than a month. The creators have their own blog on the site too. The first post describes how they started.
It began as an “IRC channel,” or an Internet relay chat, “which allowed a few friends in France to exchange FML stories with each other.” It became a micro-blog in January 2008.
As the site’s audience grew, an English version was created. Now, both British and American users can compete with one another’s bad day stories.
The name for the site however was hotly debated before F*** My Life was officially chosen. “Today S–t Happens,” “What a Fail” and just plain “FAIL” were considered as well.
Without an official name, knock-off sites presented to be a challenge. Some posts to the creators’ blog gave grief on their similarity, but after comparing FMyLife.com to its original French version, Viedemerde.fr, there was no denying it’s the original.
The team’s blog has received a lot of positive feedback, too. With a name that sticks, now all they need is a good fan base, and FMyLife.com is looking at long life on the Internet.
Lara Taylor Strayer can be reached at lara.strayer@temple.edu.
I went to my boyfriends house, and I was 99.9 persent sure he was gonna propose, we were sitting on the bed, and i got up to wash my hands, and he started screaming,i turend around and there was a huge spot of blood on the bed…. long story short, he broke up with me that night.