Mindsploitation: Asinine Assignments for the Online Homework Cheating Industry

by Vernon Chatman

There are hundreds of online companies that will do your homework for you — at a price. But will they write ANY essay you request? Only the WORST of these horrible companies were employed in the composition of Mindsploitation. A GREAT DEAL of money was wasted ACROSS THE GLOBE to commission what may be the dumbest collection of ridiculous assignments in HUMAN HISTORY.

What does it say about our society that we can buy a quick custom eulogy for our grandmother, or pay to have a love poem for a mistress prepared by a stranger at the click of a button? How entitled is a culture that keeps these services afloat? Mindsploitation uses such questions as a launching pad for wildly entertaining comedic exchanges. The 50 assignments in this book hilariously explore self-help, spirituality, family, health, diet, pop culture, love, and more.

Genres: Humor, Nonfiction, Comedy

184 pages, Paperback

First published March 19, 2013

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

The premise of MINDSPLOITATION is a clever one: to submit fake requests for homework to the paper mill industry (those online outfits that offer to write papers for college kids for a price)...with the twist that the homework tasks he's asking them to write are clearly insane and invented, often from imaginary college classes that would never exist in reality. And if you know Vernon Chatman (from such TV programs as WONDER SHOWZEN) then you know just how crazy these might get. The results (all published here since he bought them!) are priceless...

Quick example: he writes to one paper mill claiming that his "AdBas" class (advertising basics) teacher has assigned him to come up with a "grever" (great and clever) slogan for items like "Brogurt" and "BabboonHeartHam" and -- my personal favorite -- "The Ouija Squeegee: a device that allows the restless dead to clean your car windshield by scrawling messages from the afterworld into the accumulated filth." The paper mill, of course, provides results like this one for the aforementioned Squeegee: "Let the arms of the dead work for you with the super and natural power to clean your windscreen!"

Chatman's humorous baiting of the plagiarism marketplace is hilarious, audacious, and most of all, ingenious. It punks the fakers by outfaking them. Even if they do catch a whiff of the pranking he's up to, they still follow-through for the money, and reveal their own idiocy in the process. What I liked best about this book is that even when Chatman submits completely ludicrous requests for fake homework -- and even more so, when he has the audacity to raise the level of their outrageousness when he returns their lame first attempts for "corrections" -- the cheating industry still provides a terrible product with a straight-face, ridden with errors in logic, spelling and cultural awareness (several of the paper mills he punks here are clearly working overseas). Although Chatman is mostly fishing for humorous results he can share, his tactics function as a sort of expose journalism.

As an English teacher, I am glad this book exists, and I may even assign it to my first year writing students!

[Oriana]

Apparently what happened here is this fella (a comedy writer, dontcha know) went to a bunch of those sites where they'll write your research paper for you and said things like this:

My midterm thesis essay paper is an exploration of Alternate Endings To Great Works of Literature. All I need from you is to come up with some Alternate endings to some Great works of literature … Provide a new ending to Catcher In The Rye where Holden Caulfield turns into a crawfish and goes into some kind of retail business.

And this book is all the essays he got back.

Yes, please.

[Jamie Grefe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vernon Chatman, mastermind behind such shows at "The Heart, She Holler," "Wonder Showzen," and other PFFR-related oddities presents a series of bizarre essays pitched to and written by online essay writing companies. The results are hilarious, disturbing, and utterly unique. This is Chatman's first book and I would gladly read more of his work were he to craft fiction, poetry, or his own nonfiction work.

[Amar Pai · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good idea, poor execution. The author's assignments are too "zany." A more subtle touch would have made the whole thing funnier. As it stands the inherently funny/absurd premise of the book gets weighed down and sunk by the wacky trying-too-hard-to-be-funny writing style.

Basically this isn't as good as that other book where some guy writes to various corporations with absurd requests... that guy knew how to let the joke unfold without beating you over the head with it

[Robbie Bruens]

A good and silly time for the most part. Plenty of indelible absurdist images and conceits. The most satisfying moments come when the responses take a prompt in a completely unexpected and horrifying direction. The endless march of letters and essays can occasionally get a little dreary and repetitive - but mostly this is a lot of transgressive crazy fun.

[britt_brooke · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short essay collection was certainly entertaining but not quite as hilarious as I was hoping. Many of the "assignments" were just too absurd for me. I know that was the intent, so I'm not knocking points there.

It was a quick, mindless read, best consumed as 3 to 5 essays at a time.

[Downward · Rating 3 out of 5]

vernon chatman - the guy behind wondershowzen and the shivering truth - gives us a book of essays that were written by those services that students can pay to write essays for them for school. it's a great concept, where he gives the companies crazier and crazier assignments and asks them for more absurd revisions, resulting in really insane essays. that all sounds funny because it is, but it's also ultimately kind of tedious after the first couple and ends up being one of those things that's a lot better in concept than it is in execution.

[Shane Karas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a pretty fun book overall. Not brilliant, but enjoyable. My two complaints would be (1) that it became relatively stale pretty quickly and (2) that the author thought himself quite a bit funnier than I thought him.

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Feels like the Longmont Potion Castle of books somehow. Really funny but I got sick of it after a while. Honestly the premise itself is genius, I almost wish he attempted to create a bit of a narrative throughline.

[Kim Grandizio · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. Meh.

[Lukas Foerster]

right book at the right time

[David Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Verne has done it again. Very similar to Final Flesh in execution with even some of the same references. I laughed out loud a lot and read this in a Xavier voice.

[Christopher Roth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Consistently original and funny, though not as rolling-in-the-aisles funny as most reviewers seemed to find it, and it should also be said that I'm glad this book wasn't much longer than it actually is. What is most surprising to me about the online homework cheating industry is how many operations out there sell pre-written term papers and so on that are actually horrifically ungrammatical and poorly organized. I suppose for cheaters this provides verisimilitude, so that no teacher will say, "You're not capable of writing this," except that so much of the writing includes dropped articles and other clues that the writers are native speakers of Russian with very little English. These people are not just crooks, they are pathetic as well.

[Iivo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yeah, it is possible to make someone laugh with just words. With just random emails. When they are deeply dark, when they are just bleak, with enough cul-de-sacs in the land of non sequiturs and devil-may-care-attitude.

[Rj · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book had me cracking up. A very enjoyable read.

[Camhayden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy Sh*t!!!

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't think I have ever laughed this hard. Brilliant.

[Shane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Made me laugh out loud.

[Nicholas Katers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very funny and clever!

[Gabe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of it is very funny but it got a little bit repetitive.

[Glyven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Any student who would pay to have strangers do his homework deserves to get ripped off, flunked, and ridiculed in a book by a comedian. However, this is not that book. Vernon Chatman is not so interested in targeting lazy, unscrupulous students, though he does pose as a series of them here. Instead, his main goal is to poke non-gentle fun at the companies that profit off of these pathetic pupils, which he accomplishes by sending those companies the most outlandish assignments he can devise.

The tone of Chatman's letters is aggressively obnoxious and clearly goofing on his targets, which just goes to show how willing these companies are to make a buck, even when the customer is openly mocking them. Occasionally, Chatman's letters approach the virtuosic wordplay of his writing for the series Xavier: Renegade Angel; even so, the focus is on the work of the essayists-for-hire, and more often than not, it's hilariously stupid. Sometimes the writers fail to grasp the simplest of instructions, however absurd those instructions may be. When they do follow Chatman's guidelines, we get such gems as the letter to a prison warden in which every sentence ends with "and I aint yanking your nugget," or the absurdist experimental story "Waiting for Sam and Gene" (as in Beckett and Ionesco).

If you've seen Chatman's film Final Flesh, you've figured out by now that Mindsploitation is essentially the literary version of that. If you liked the film, you'll probably enjoy the book as well.

[Joshua Orloski]

This is book is equal parts goofy, hilarious and incredibly stupid. A collection of totally off the wall requests to online essay writing companies and their equally insane finished essays. This really makes me want to start a essay writing website.