Happy Third Birthday, Nathan Rabin's Happy Place!

I may be biased, but this is my favorite website

Three years ago today Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place debuted, powered by a combination of creative inspiration and financial desperation. In the two years since I’d been laid off from my staff writer position at The Dissolve in 2015 I’d wandered in the wilderness creatively, making my living primarily from a series of columns for places like Rotten Tomatoes, The A.V Club and Splitsider that were getting cancelled at an alarming rate. 

Just a few days before the Happy Place was set to launch I got an email informing me that, due to declining page-views and the ever-changing needs of the pop culture media landscape, The A.V Club would no longer be running My World of Flops, my ten year old column on spectacular entertainment failure, but that I would be allowed to write a farewell column. 

My World of Flops was far and away the most successful and popular thing I’d ever done professionally. It was my signature column. The first entry introduced the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” into the cultural lexicon and the column was spun off into a 2010 book. And now it was being killed for not being successful or popular enough. At the time that did not feel like an unusually brutal and personal rejection: it felt like death. 

Thankfully I was allowed to continue the column at my own site. The worst thing that had happened to me since getting fired from The Dissolve became an enormous stroke of good luck for a website that almost instantly became my entire life professionally, a deeply personal labor of love that I poured my heart and soul into every single day. 

My great hope for Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place was that if I had complete creative freedom and solid financial backing, I could create something wonderful and unique, a website that would be like an X-ray of my soul. 

Other than My World of Flops, the signature feature of Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place would be The Weird Accordion to Al, a daily ramble through the complete discography of a national treasure whose coffee-table book I’d co-written with Al himself early in the decade. 

I was blown away by the response to the launch of the Happy Place. it almost instantly became a self-sustaining business though I was a little disheartened at the modest readership of The Weird Accordion to Al. It’s almost as if a thousand words a day on obscure album cuts was too much for a non-“Weird Al” Yankovic-specific audience. 

The Weird Accordion to Al never did find a substantial audience until it really counted: when I launched crowd-funding campaigns for The Weird Accordion to Al book and seven stops on Al’s 2018 Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour, which gave me a great chapter for the extended version of the Weird Accordion to Al book, due out at the end of June, and considerable insight into Al and his world. Plus, I got to go to seven “Weird Al” Yankovic concerts, so it was a win-win all around. 

The least popular, and consequently lucrative column in Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place history became, through multiple crowd-funding campaigns and then royalties, the most lucrative and successful element of the site. The Weird Accordion to Al book has done well enough that I’ve been able to pay off a nice chunk of my paralyzing credit card debt and put a little money away for my family during the most extreme financial crisis of my lifetime. That is a beautiful thing.

I consider myself profoundly lucky to wake up every morning excited to do work that matters to me for an audience that understands and appreciates me, that sees me not as an unemployable has been but rather as someone with something unique and worthwhile to contribute to the world. 

I haven’t done it alone, of course. My brilliant sister-in-law Romy Maloon designed the website and recently did a low-key re-design, Felipe Sobreiro did amazing illustrations for the Weird Accordion to Al book I have shamelessly re-purposed for my website and Clint Worthington turned me into a podcaster with his editing, production and co-hosting of first Nathan Rabin’s Happy Cast and then Travolta/Cage. 

I could not be more excited about Travolta/Cage and The Travolta/Cage Project, my online and podcast exploration of the complete filmographies of Nicolas Cage and John Travolta, even though the readership has been exceedingly modest so far. If The Travolta/Cage Project were on another site there’s a very good chance they would have pulled the plug by this point but one of the great things about having your own site, and being your own boss, is that you can be patient in ways larger sites cannot. 

This site would not exist without readers and patrons and commenters. You’ve made this a very special, very rare place on the internet with your thoughtful comments and moral and financial support. I am perpetually amazed by how decent and considerate and non-trolly the site’s commenters, on the high level of discourse among readers who make this a regular destination.  

This is a Happy Place because of you as much as it is because of me. 

In the past I’ve been frustrated by the site’s lack of growth in terms of income and audience, by the way its Patreon haul has stagnated or decreased instead of growing consistently. I’ve been frustrated by how I’ve made just enough to support myself and not anything more. 

I’m more appreciative these days. Now I’m incredibly thankful that I get to make enough to continue doing something I love with all my heart and feel passionately about. 

I’m fucking blessed, y’all, and I feel like this site is in a really strong place as the world crumbles around it. 

I’ve never needed this site more than I do now. I hope y’all are getting something special and essential from it as well. 

Here’s to three very good years! Happy birthday, Happy Place! 

The Happy Place would absolutely LOVE it if you would consider giving it a birthday present by pledging at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

AND of course, you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al, the Happy Place’s very first book, at https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Accordion-Al-Obsessively-Co-Author/dp/1658788478/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=weird+accordion&qid=1580693427&sr=8-1#customerReviews

Or you can buy a copy directly from me by Paypalling 20 dollars to nathanrabin@sbcglobal.net for an autographed copy, shipping included 

AND you can and should buy my even NEWER book, Postal, at https://bossfightbooks.com/products/postal-by-brock-wilbur-nathan-rabin