We're a little late in publishing this. You can primarily thank Calliander for that, since he claims to have been too busy to get his votes in. In any event, the tallies are in for the 2013 Unacceptables Awards. This is a review of the incredibly dumb shit that happened in 2013 and a critical damnation/lambasting for how you assholes responded to it. These are not presented in any kind of chronological order, outside of:
Sneak Preview: Fictional Character Surveys
Not much needs to be said about this. Were we not late in announcing this years' results, these surveys would have garnered their own urgent update - much like Vine got.
You know what we're talking about. They're all over Buzzfeed and other sites, they let you find out whether you're Han Solo or Obi-Wan Kenobi, and - for some inexplicable reason - everyone feels compelled to hit that "share" button so that everyone in their social media circles is inundated with them.
It is not 2006. MySpace is no longer a thing. Cut it out. These surveys are not acceptable.
Continually Annoying: The Hashtag
This special award has been given to the same recipient for the last five years and it continues to become more and more unacceptable with each year that goes by. A little history: the hash sign is ancient but came to prominent use in old-school internet chat rooms to denote a "channel" for talking. Channels were specific areas of relevance so if you wanted to go chat with a bunch of people about Super Nintendo you connected to a chat server and could do that under "#supernintendo" easily. The people who invented Twitter decided that functionality could be used to group discussion topics. You could click on the hashtag for "supernintendo" and find all the Tweets relevant to it because the site was not huge.
Along with Twitter's popularity came an untenable focus on "trending" topics. With "trending" topics there came ad agencies and news headlines. The original use of the hashtag - completely valid and functionally better than search terms in an honest environment - became polluted with the following things:
- Companies, trying to drum up hype legitimately or otherwise.
- Shameless self-promoter want-to-be-famous types, trying to drum up hype legitimately or otherwise.
To be fair, there are plenty of hashtags out there that relate properly. Now, though, nobody clicks on them. (And anyone who does is a fucking moron.) They are made up and/or included in the hopes of becoming "trending" and giving the spotlight to their creator. An example: A person posts an update of a smoothie they whipped up - something that nobody gives even one shit about - and writes "#smoothie #raspberry #apple #pear #banana #yogurt #eatclean" as their description. This is an entirely annoying and unacceptable way to communicate, and that doesn't even take into account the level of narcissism involved.
Dumbest Food: Cronuts
The cronut was named one of the best inventions of 2013 by Time magazine. If you were wondering whether Time magazine was still relevant, there is your answer. Cronuts are a pastry that take the production of a croissant and combine that with the shape and deep-frying of a doughnut. The French douchebag in New York City who invented them must have been so proud of his portmanteau, along with its immediate spread amongst foodie circles.
Our dislike stems from three areas:
- Foodies. No further explanation is needed there.
- It's a dumb-sounding word. Similar to our first list and the pronunciation of the word, "GIF," how a word sounds coming out of peoples' mouths is quite important.
- This whole idea of one food item being the fixation of a news article is absurd. Outside of maybe a really good crème brûlée or a particularly good presentation of… nah, never mind. We were going to justify a food-based news article but it really isn't defensible.
There's a black market for these things - they sell for $5 and there are knockoffs (the bakery has the name as a registered trademark, by the way) plus scalpers selling them for $100. Make sure to re-read the last five words of that sentence. The amount of pretension involved with these escapades is entirely out right.
Worst Viral Video: The Harlem Shake
This was actually a tie so we were forced to actually think for a bit to determine the actual winner. An equal amount of votes went to "What Does the Fox Say?" by Norwegian comedy duo Ylvis. Upon review we had to turn down our unfunny, nonsensical entry from Norway. Why, you ask? When it comes down to it, it's the part in bold about Ylvis. They intentionally made the song to be funny, and even though the level of funny seems to have been switched for the level of annoying, that fact still remains. The intent was funny, and intent definitely matters a lot. Also, the same group is capable of funny things (see "Someone Like Me").
Our winner was, oddly enough, also intended to be funny. So what puts it in front? For starters, the song is absolutely worse and more annoying than anything the fox says. Secondly, if we are talking about "The [name of group] Version of This Viral Video" quantities, the ones generated by The Harlem Shake make it the winner - and that doesn't even take quality into account.
The original Harlem Shake video, like Ylvis's entry, is terrible and unfunny. Stunningly, every single copycat version of it is equally terrible and unfunny. Not even one is good. Take into account that the majority of them were made for the same reason that all of those asshats put hashtags in their Tweets and you have a miserable mess on par with (if not worse) than, "Shit [type of people] Say," our 2012 winner of this award.
Over-Saturated Celebrity: Jennifer Lawrence
There isn't a particularly long diatribe to go with this award. Everywhere you turned in 2013, people were talking about some aspect of Jennifer Lawrence - be that her professed love of pizza, her supposed non-conformance to the thin body type of Hollywood, or her status as an idol to preteen girls. We don't have anything against her at all - we're just tired of hearing about her (especially since she is definitely thin).
Over-Saturated Television Show: Doctor Who
We have to be honest here. This was 1 vote from being a tie with Breaking Bad and the deciding vote was made with full knowledge of this, and with the hope that Doctor Who fans would read and be angrier. The whole antihero television show idea was run dry by the time Dexter came on (even though Dexter was pretty good for a few seasons) so while some dude making meth may very well be the best show to come out since Six Feet Under, who cares. Doctor Who has been around longer, its fans are provably insane, and listening to them prattle on about it is a million times worse than hearing a Walter White fanatic's ravings. For some reason, 2013 brought so many of them out of the woodwork and there were news articles, contests, and other tie-ins (including a Google Maps addition). Breaking Bad's had a steady, rabid fan base mostly the entire time. Who knows what caused the uptick in Doctor Who fan volume, but it is measurably higher and thus puts this show on top.
Most Overused Meme: Doge
The doge meme is actually not a newcomer to the arena. It first popped up in 2010, when the owner of a Shiba Inu posted the pictures. The spelling, and usage of phrases like, "wow," "such doge," and "very like," to indicate being impressed mock both online newbies who lack the capacity to focus on spelling or grammar and also the mentally handicapped. It rose to incredible prominence in 2013, however, and became such a combination of "incorrect use" and "Chuck Norris" that it beats out all other memes this year handily. Now that there is a cryptocurrency based around the damned thing, it's pretty safe to say it's wholly unacceptable now.
Dumbest Popular News: The Royal Baby
The number of people around the world who were wrapped up in the gender and name of William and Kate's child is staggering. It received more notice than all but one other headline story - beating out actual news like gun control legislature post-Newtown, the Boston Marathon bombing, Obamacare website problems, Edward Snowden, and Syria (to name a few).
To say that anything having to do with the "royal baby" is chaff is to do a disservice to corn and wheat. It would be absolutely mind-boggling that it was one of America's top news stories if Duck Dynasty wasn't the number one television program in the country.
Most Useless New Service: Vine
That we had to issue a mid-year, emergency update to address Vine speaks to how utterly pointless of a service it is, and how absentmindedly naïve the people who use it are. If we wanted to watch an animated GIF you know what we would do? We'd go watch an animated GIF! The animated GIF would be of something funny, as well. For the love of all that is sane in this world, why would we want an animated GIF that's not a GIF, is like three to four times the size of one, and is of some fuckwit's two year-old pushing around a Laugh & Learn? We wouldn't, and thus Vine is majestically useless.
The Absolute Most Annoyingly Cloying Sites: TIE - Buzzfeed & Upworthy
This was a tie that could not be broken via discussion, thought, listing cons side-by-side, or any other means of determination. For a brief minute we tried to go with the older site, Buzzfeed, since it's been around long enough to know better… but then, Upworthy is new and especially annoying. There was much bickering for a while and eventually we decided the only thing to do was to shit all over both sites since both are the crappy, curated feces of the web.
Buzzfeed's main annoying claim to fame is its formulaic pandering to twenty-somethings and other millenials via arbitrary lists of puerile hodgepodge that they so deeply feel is directly connected to them when, in reality, some dickface in an office scoured information that follows those assholes around the web via the billion marketing firms and told them what twenty-somethings and other millienials are interested in. Put succinctly, Buzzfeed manipulates its readers via the cookies that places like DoubleClick use. These cum guzzlers make money by baiting links via pseudo-provocative titles like, "19 Scientific Reasons You Should Take More Naps." Most of them are just niblets of information pulled from other web sites and grafted together with animated GIFs, and you should feel bad for even clicking to view them. We hope you feel especially bad if you read the article we mentioned (a real one).
Upworthy is eerily similar but even more malicious because they are playing directly to effete liberals looking to share something they feel is moving or life changing. Usually, an Upworthy "article" (if it can even be called that) is a video they learned of from some other site (possibly Buzzfeed) and then posted with a headline like, "This thing happened. What happened next [will blow your mind/will change the way you think about x/some other saccharine bullshit]." In a majority of instances, this link-baiting headline and pathetic excuse for journalism is political in nature so it helps the snob-o-crat to spread their agenda to other like-minded dipshits on social media.
Both are entirely unacceptable.
Stupidest Buzzword: Epic
Describing things as "epic" has been continually passed over for a few years - even in 2012, when it was arguably at its most overused. "Selfie" was 1 vote behind it, if that gives you any indication, and we really wanted it to be first since it's been featured in a Garfield comic strip. It's pretty obvious that you're engaging in something mind-bogglingly stupid when Jim Davis puts it into his outstandingly banal comics. Alas, it was finally the time for "epic" since this year provided CNN headlines with "epic fail" in the title.
There are so many reasons to have stopped using it as an adjective as early as 2009, but no: you fuckers decided to tell your friend who tripped that it was an "epic" fail or to say that Jon's beard is so fucking "epic" and the craft brew from XYZ in ABC has some "epic" hoppiness. Everything is "epic" with you dingleberry harvesters. Let's see what the Greeks think.
An epic (from the Ancient Greek adjective ἐπικός (epikos), from ἔπος (epos) "word, story, poem") is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation.
While one could probably write a lengthy narrative poem about how bad the launch of the Obamacare site was, that's not really a good use of the format. Additionally, the word has been modernized, so let's see what the regular dictionary says.
Heroic; majestic; impressively great: the epic events of the war. Also, of unusually great size or extent: a crime wave of epic proportions.
The aforementioned items certainly don't fall under the first part. In no way could the burgers and fries at The Counter be considered heroic, majestic, or impressively great. The second part might possibly fit but think about it for a second: when your friend tripped and hurt his leg, was that really "of unusually great size or extent?" Your laughter at his misfortune was probably of unusually great size or extent, though. (Yeah, we resisted the Mom joke.) Is Jon a member of ZZ Top? Those guys have beards that fit into the definition but we'd be willing to bet that Jon's does not. His beard is, at best, like the one on the dude from, "Epic Meal Time." See what we did there?
So shut the fuck up about things that are epic. We dislike it so much that we won't even wrap up this part with a quaint mention of it - the word is used so much that your mom is jealous. (Yup.)
Most Ineffective Insult: Hipster
This one doesn't really need too much of an explanation, to be honest. The word, "hipster," has become so ubiquitous and is used to denote so many things now that labeling something as such means nothing. It's like slapping the word, "organic," on a product or apologizing after saying something as preposterous as, "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." (No, we aren't mad because someone called us one or used it to describe something we liked.)
It's a useless adjective and amounts to nothing, making it unacceptable as an insult.
The Overall Loser of 2013
Previously, we mentioned one headline beating out the Royal Baby. That headline centered around the behavior of a young, female performer at a music awards show.
Of course, we refer to Miley Cyrus. Everything surrounding that performance - from the people decorating their Christmas trees with her "Wrecking Ball" pose (yes, they are related) to the adoption of the word "twerk" by every day white folks - is an absolutely stunning loss for humanity. Anyone who watched the performance, anyone who twerks, anyone who does anything slightly related to Miley Cyrus is now a top shelf bag of dicks. A sack of useless, unacceptable cocks. Parody videos, news headlines, hashtags, Christmas ornaments, TMZ: everyone and everything. We think the sheer stupidity of everything surrounding this tart is probably self evident to the intelligent people, and nothing we could ever say will sway the minds of the rest of you Cro-Magnons. We're also well aware of the "irony" in our discussing the topic.
So we'll just leave it at, as always, "Unacceptable."
Enjoy!