I always feel vaguely ripped off when I even have to impress a blog or news headline that promises a “top 10″ or “5 predictions” and “trends to watch for”. These things are everywhere – and if you were to take all of the reasons why, threw them into a pot and boiled the shit out of them, what would be left in the bottom, aside from shit, would be a thick froth of laziness.
I can’t really blame writers for keying these things in. They are easy – you just pick a topic, pull 5 or 10 (depending on how long it needs to be) loosely related subjects out of your ass and then steal/modify the wikipedia intro paragraph on it just enough to claim it as your own. EASY.
In fact, I’m going to write one now, to show how I, not even enough of a writer to call myself a hack, can also do this:
1. “Best of” topic lists. This very thing I’m pissing/moaning about – and this very list you are reading – are examples of this item. As I mentioned, they are easy to find and are inexplicably always pushed to the top of aggregate sites or forwarded to me in email. Apparently people love these non-items, but then people won’t stop yapping about the bloody weather either. I’m so sick of hearing about how cold/rainy/windy/hot/it’s raining but oh we needed it… Yes, it IS cold/wet/hot/dry/wet/radioactive – it’s fucking called winter/spring/summer/the lake/thermonuclear war! It happens every year, get over it.
I suspect we’ll be seeing many more of these in 2009 and on until the end of time or the final extinction of humankind, whichever comes first.
2. Multiple Penises (or penii in the correct latin wording) on glowing sheep. That’s right, idiots, this is what those big science grants are going toward, other than those week long cocaine-fueled low-orbit parties put on by NASA, it’s going to be bigger than Viagra 2.0. Twice as hard too.
Those bio-engineering geniuses that brought us sheep that glow in the dark, by crossing the streams with firefly testicles, will soon unveil the fruits of their most recent labour. The family jewels will soon have one more gem added to the arrangement, for sheep anyway – as the eons-old dream of man comes ever closer to becoming true. We’ve conquered flight, landed on the moon and soon we’ll finally be able to simultaneously write our first and last names in the snow.
3. Renewed acceptance of stimulants. As our media mouthpieces constantly remind us, we’re living in an increasingly fast-paced society. Soon, it will time for caffeine to take a backseat to food additives that can take charge of our sitution – one that demands a heart rate of a hummingbird and the ability to snap into a eye-bleeding, paranoiac rage in less than the time it takes to say “Our debit machine isn’t working, is that OK?”. I hate it when that happens, I never carry cash with me anymore, y’know? Don’t knock it, that line totally works on those child panhandlers you see lurking outside liquor stores dressed up like baseball players or Brownies.
4. The Death of “Traditional” Journalism (as we know it). I say, buhbye… I’m not going to miss it. For the last while, the panicked whining noise has risen to a wailing squawk (not unlike that of a big monkey-bird actually) from the stys of professional, Big-Guys journalismos – worrying their arseholes into knots because “the bloggers” are making them obsolete. All the while waving their self-righteous flags of “protecting democracy” and “journalistic integrity” as if such things were even remotely true. Only morons believe that tripe, the rest of us use our bullshit-detection skills we’ve developed over the years of being force-fed media shite – and get the story for ourselves, parsing out the closest thing to what the reality on the ground might be from direct, multiple sources – most of whom wear their bias on their sleeve, not having to bow to agency political pressure in an act of ass-covering.
Not all “traditional” journalists are as bad as I make them out. These will survive in the new information age. The rest will still be bitching to each other about how they got shafted long after they’ve gone into politics.
5. More assholes making life less enjoyable for the rest of us. Pardon my french, but wouldn’t life be a lot more fun if 98 percent of the self-important, goodygood-arseholes in the world would just fuck off? Seriously. Sometimes I just have to shake my head in disbelief at the crap I see people up to. Whether it is: the greedy dinosaurs trying to screw over our copyright laws into something utterly one-sided and ridiculous, those trying to destroy net-neutrality, companies not paying female employees equal wages with what men make on equal work, or cowjuice sputtering, inbred fucktards seething hatred and explosive disregard for spelling and grammar on Youtube comment rolls – you people need to fuck off.
Yes, this article is convoluted and badly written. I told you, I’m not anything close to being a writer. If you read it this far, I feel sorry for you. I only started writing this to try out wordpress for the first real time and it kind of got out of control. If I really cared, I’d change this site from the default theme. Maybe I’ll start caring tomorrow.
My apologies. I used an awful lot of hyphens there. Whatever.
