On Badness, or The Art of Bad: A Study on Inferiority Exploring things that suck hard and the ramifications thereof

Michael Seaholm        

Undergraduate - Computer Science

 

On Badness, or The Art of Bad: A Study on Inferiority

Exploring things that suck hard and the ramifications thereof

 

            Life is full of wonderful and mysterious things: the winking scarlet rays of the setting sun darting about the dusky landscape; staring up at the endless, impermeable cascade of the heavens; the crisp satisfaction of filling out each of the innumerable little fields on a 1040A tax form; and so forth. This week's article will not be about any of these things. Rather, this article will address some things that are, in the opinion of this author, affronts to the sentient peoples of this world. I must warn you, anonymous reader whom I have never met but whom I must surely have seen in my dreams, that none of the items listed below fit into that “so bad it's good” category that everybody is always so jazzed about nowadays. A more fitting descriptor would be “so bad that it is really bad and I would rather cut off both my arms with a chainsaw than deal with this shit, oh my Jesus.” Please note that I bear no responsibility for any damages incurred from viewing the materials below. That responsibility rests entirely upon this publication, which you should blame immediately for everything bad in the world.

 

Twilight: To give the reader some idea of the maddening internal processes that spurred me into attempting to read this assemblage of words by Stephanie Meyer, I will try to explain to you my train of thought at the time. I had just finished reading The Stand, a million-page tome by that master of the written word, Stephen “Compulsive Novel Writer” King, and I thought that I should read some Twilight for a lark. Moving from one of King's works to Twilight was sort of like replacing Fox's hit television show House with an eight-hour slide show of dead kittens: it just gets worse and worse until finally you either leave the room a hollow shell of a human being or your retinas start to bleed. Twilight reads like the ramblings of a self-obsessed, terminally self-aware teenage girl who holds physical attractiveness as the highest determinant of a person's integrity, scribbled into a diary between doses of lithium in the jagged penmanship of someone perpetually close to tears. The brief section that I read was a stumbling and awkward assault on metaphors, grammar, and the English language in general. No one is spared from this literary holocaust. Knowing that there was no way I could ever finish this collection of pages with words written on them, I eventually stopped reading everything that wasn't in quotations. “The dialogue is what will save me from going completely mad,” I had thought hopefully. When I came to, my house was in flames and I was sitting naked on the coffee table. In summary, the coming of Twilight was most likely foretold in some unspeakable grimoire of horrors, warning against its dark powers and its role in hastening the end of days.


Transformers 2: The first Transformers movie was, at the very least, not a complete insult to the movie-going public; the plot mostly made sense and there was some semblance of internal logic. Realizing that he could simply replace plot cohesion with more explosions, Michael Bay decided to roll Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen out on the red carpet, where it proceeded to break numerous records and garner critical acclaim in the form of gold bullion. Unfortunately, there is a veritable laundry list of things that were fundamentally wrong with Transformers 2. For starters, the amount of humping in this film – which features both dog-on-dog and Transformer-on-leg action – was more typical of a youth abstinence camp than a summer blockbuster. Every Decepticon looked the same, so the fight scenes became an ambiguous orgy of grey metal robot parts; I was pretty sure that Megatron had been destroyed at least six times throughout the course of the film. Shia LeBeouf starts seeing crazy Transformer symbols in his head at one point in what was probably supposed to be plot development, and in one scene he announces to his peers during class that Einstein was wrong because he forgot to take into account “ma'fuckin' energon cubes”. Then there was a friggin' bearded Scottish Transformer who walked with a metal cane and could teleport without any explanation. And, on top of that, the Decepticons apparently built a Transformer facsimile of a human female to seduce and/or kill Shia LeBeouf rather than, say, use this technology to infiltrate the upper echelons of government and gain control of the All-Spark, or whatever the hell the antagonists' motives were. Staring into the sun for several hours before watching this film would only inconvenience the savvy moviegoer in one respect: his or her ability to listen to the film would not be compromised.

 

The Big Mac Wrap: For those of you who are unaware or unwilling to know about this, McDonald's now offers a snack wrap version of its famous Big Mac burger. This would be fine, except that the end result is a hideous abomination before the eyes of men. It looks like someone snapped a hamburger patty in half, half-assed a wrap, and put some filling around it, and slapped a $1.67 price tag on it in what is, paradoxically, an apology and an insult at the same time. It's as though McDonald's assumes that, after the advent of the KFC Famous Bowls, its client base, which at this point extends to all of humanity, has reverted to a state of abject indignity, much like Kanye West. We should probably move on to a different topic, seeing how I could easily slip into one of my frequent rage blackouts if we continue along this thread.

 

Stratego: I should clarify that I am actually a big fan of this famous strategic board game; if given the choice, I would name my first child Stratego, although this might just be linked to my deep-rooted hatred of children. My particular grievance has to do with a very old computerized version of Stratego that I occasionally punish myself with since I do not own a whip. Even though I properly obscure the location of my flags and my high-ranking troops, the computer is successfully able to stratege my weak point and strike for massive damage, even on the easiest setting. The level of precognitive computer bullshittery involved is staggering, and it brings to mind the image of a horrific post-apocalyptic future in which humanity can only stand frozen in fear as self-aware war machines beat them at Stratego. In order to win this War of Terror, here are five basic steps to avoiding a slow death:

 

1. Surrender unconditionally.

2. Wait until you are brought before the Machine Overmind for trial. Please note how easy it would be to plunge a hatchet into its primary synthetic neuron cluster.

3. Plunge a hatchet into its primary synthetic neuron cluster.

4. While the rest of the machine army flails around mindlessly, capture the flag.

5. Congratulations! You win Stratego forever.



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