HOW TO BE ST00P1D ON TWITTER

Unlike many people who use Twitter, I am very picky about who follows my tweets. Yes, this is mostly because I have nothing else to do. But it is also because I can’t stand getting replies from st00p1d people.

Most of these “people” are, of course,  bots. These are the automated programs created by former and current nun rapists and baby abusers to spam Twitter accounts with advertisements, porn links, political screeds and other varieties of Waste My Time. There are millions of bots with Twitter accounts, and if you’re not as dedicated as I am to blocking them, you will find you soon have a couple hundred followers with nonsense names who are only interested in telling you about a new celebrity blowjob movie or fake antivirus program they “found.”

It's hard sorting through your follower list, deciding who to block. This is why most people don’t do it. If you happen to be one of these people who thinks tending your follower list is too much trouble, I’m proud to say I can lend you a hand. See, I’ve come up with a list of 14 things a particular Twitter account can be and / or do that fully justifies banning it. I’ve based this list on the behavior of bots, so you can be sure that if you adhere to it, you’ll successfully block all the bots. It will also help you block the real people who act like bots, or might just as fucking well.

I predict that if you stick to this list with as much dedication as I do, your Twitter experience will be significantly less st00p1d. You’re welcome in advance.

Now to the list. I will block your Twitter account if you are or do any of the following:

1. Have an unpronounceable name AND have a name followed by a bunch of numbers (probably a bot).

Yes, some non-robotic people might actually have a Twitter account that looks like one of these. Let’s say your parents immigrated to America from Backwardsassistan, and your last name is “Hwixxhwillw.” And because your 150 cousins got on Twitter first, you’re forced to become Hwixxhwillw_151.

But if this is you, Mr. or Mrs. or Dr. Hwixxhwillw, I’d like to point two things out to you. First of all, your name looks an awful lot like a bunch of random letters generated by an automated spam bot creating 200,000 new Twitter accounts at once through which to tell the world about the latest fake Britney Spears sex tape. For your own sake, Mr. or Mrs. or Dr. Hwixxhwillw, please be web savvy enough to make up another name for Twitter so you aren’t mistaken for the lowest cyberscum and get lost in the blocking.

Second of all, and this is very important, THERE IS NO FUCKING LAW THAT SAYS YOU HAVE TO USE YOUR GODDAMN NOT-UNIQUE LAST NAME AS YOUR TWITTER ACCOUNT. There was also no law saying this about AOL screen names, there is no law saying this about Gmail accounts or Yahoo! mail addresses, and there will NEVER BE a law saying this about anything as long as the Internet exists. No one cares what your fucking name is, and the people who do are the people you really don’t want having access to your name. Come up with another name. Around these parts we call that “coming up with another goddamn name,” and if you haven’t figured it out yet, almost all of us have done this at least once. Mine happens to be TheBluesader.

Yes, I know. You probably thought until this very moment that TheBluesader was my given name. But it isn’t. You stupid pile of out-of-touch retard.

And I can already hear the argument: “But this Twitter account is for work! I HAVE to use my real name!” To which I respond: “Oh, so it’s a corporate Twitter account? Well, isn’t that just – BLOCK.”

2. Tweet nothing but URLs (probably a bot).

This is all bots tweet. Know who else tweets nothing but links to websites I probably already know exist, or didn’t want to know existed? Idiots. And not the pitiable, adorable kind of idiot like the person you married. I’m talking about internet idiots, the sort of people who forced Verizon to jack up my bills so they could pay Cisco to invent fiber optics and 3G, because the idiots couldn’t be bothered to learn how to turn bitmaps into jpegs before sending them to Grandma’s inbox. And if there’s one thing I hate more than bots who intentionally fuck up the Internet, it’s morons – like your wife – who unintentionally fuck up the Internet because they can’t be bothered to think about what the hell they’re doing.

Dear pud-brains: I know how to use YouTube. And I’ve seen LOLcats. And the various 4chan image databases. If I want to see examples of “Internets humor,” I can find them myself. And because I’m TheBluesader, Junior God of the Internet, I have probably already found whatever you’re looking at now, and like ten years ago when it first appeared on /b/. I really don’t need another link to Goatse. Tweet original insights, or don’t tweet at all.

And by the way, I consider scanned images from Silver Age Batman original insights. Link to as many of them as you want. Because they are NEVER not funny anymore.

Ask the people who follow me. They know.

3. Use a stock picture of a model as your avatar AND use the generic “no photo uploaded” Twitter picture as your avatar (probably a bot).

Bots are too busy making with the spam to Photoshop an original picture for their avatar. Everyone else should have at least five minutes to crop and post a picture of their cat or something, for god’s sake. EVERYONE. If you are too busy to condense, format and post an original, personal picture of some kind to Twitter, you are officially too busy to tweet 140 characters.

And not having Photoshop or an equivalent program is no excuse. Windows still comes with MSPaint, motherfucker – use it.

4. Be a corporate account (acts like a bot).

Bots shill. That’s why they exist. Human beings, however, do not exist primarily to shill. I know, I know, that’s not what they told you during the last company retreat. But your inability to not be a robot with genitals is not my problem. If you want me to buy your product, stock it in a store or sell it through Amazon like all the other grownups. I get one whiff of advertiser wank from one of your tweets, and you’re not allowed to target me after I tweet key words anymore.

5. Be a self-help person I’ve never heard of (might as well be a bot).

You say you’re a paradigm-setting, charismatic self-starter who has spent the last eleven years happily helping your fellow citizens of Planet Earth navigate the highs and lows of this wild and wacky thing we call life?

Well, you must royally suck at it, because I’ve never heard of you before. Nor have I seen your goateed, square head on the front of that 600 page, hardcover Cosmo advice column reprint collection you’re trying to pass off as The Bible 2.0. If you were really revolutionizing life itself, I’m pretty sure Oprah would have mentioned you at least once. As it is, I’m pretty sure you’re just an overdressed douchebag desperately trying to figure out how to make a living out of that philosophy / communications double major. And I need advice from worthless nobodies like you like I need bot shill.

You’re not Dr. Phil. You’re not Steve Wilkos. And you probably never will be, no matter how many fat people you talk through sexual problems, no matter how many deadbeat fathers you won’t let sit on your stage. Leave helping stupids to the guys who make it informative and entertaining, stop pretending you’ve somehow gained worldly wisdom by 35, and finally take that well-paying accounting job so your girlfriend doesn't have to keep rescuing burgers from the trash to bring home for the kids. And most of all, stop polluting Twitter with random Sufi verses and out-of-context Carl Sagan quotes. Anyone who has ever told you that that kind of bullshit transformed their lives was either lying to make you feel good because they pity you, or being a prick for the lulz. 

6. Be a business advice person.

Most of what I just said for #5 goes for this one, too. If you were really some great corporate advisor, I have to believe you’d have a better way to hawk your skills than by spamming a thousand unsuspecting strangers on Twitter.

Just to be sure I don’t accidentally follow some of your half-assed advice and lose my life savings, I think I’ll just be safe and go ahead and BLOCK YOUR ASS.

7. Follow more than 150 people AND be followed by more than 1,000 people, and not be some kind of celebrity (which means you’re probably reaching out to me from deep within the Bot Zone).

It makes sense that real world celebrities would have thousands or even millions of followers. A lot of people know who they are, and part of the fun of Twitter is that it gives you a live digital connection to people you’d otherwise have no contact with. It also makes sense that many celebrities might follow a couple hundred people, because often times their business is probably one in which knowing people and getting up-to-the-second information from them is pretty important.

But if you’re not a celebrity, that probably means you DON’T have millions of people wanting to talk to you, and you DON’T know hundreds of people with interesting things to say. Which means that you’re only following people and being followed as a result of key word searches. And this is by far the lowest form of making Twitter contacts, because this is exactly how spam bots find new victims.

It is also very hard for me to believe that any one person spends the enormous amount of time required to click “follow” more than a couple of hundred times. The only reason anyone would dedicate this much time to Twitter is if they were getting paid to do it, which means they manage a corporate account, which I will block because of that on it's own. Otherwise it’s obvious the account in question is a bot, programmed to follow anyone who has ever tweeted the word “penis” in any context.

I guess it’s possible that someone might be such a fantastic people person that they really do know more than 200 people and care what they have to say. And it’s possible that a person like this may in fact be acquainted with more than 1,000 people who likewise care enough to follow them. But you know what? Either way, I don’t know anybody like that, and therefore don’t care to follow them, or have them following me. Not that I specifically don’t want them reading the awesome things I say. I just don’t care that I’ve accidentally blocked them during my weekly st00p1ds-blocking.

Basically, if you’re such a social butterfly that I’m forced to suspect your brain may be a flash drive, meet the Block Hammer, Probable Robot.

8. Tweet nothing but religious fundamentalist garbage.

There’s no reason to go into much detail about this one. If I don’t care enough about your love of Jewish Zeus to talk to you in real life, I’m not going to give you the opportunity to read my tweets and spam me with whining when I inevitably offend you. No, I don’t care to hear an opinion different from my own, when that opinion has been out-of-date since before the invention of pants.

The only reason we still have churches and allow them their tax-exempt status is so you weirdos will keep to yourselves and leave the rest of us alone. So be quiet and get back to your barns. The last thing we  need is you getting under our feet as we’re inventing the drugs and food additives that will sustain you your next ten years of pretending your cancer went away because Jesus Thor killed the Cancer Demons with his invisible lightning hammer.

9. Your Tweets clearly show that you have only the most basic understanding of the English language (even bots can spam clearly).

Yes, even bots can spam in basic, legible English. That’s because even the pedophiles who program them are coherent enough to know that when you only have 140 characters through which to make your point, you’d better make it easy to read.

If English isn’t your first language, that’s okay. But don’t try tweeting in your second language until you’re fluent enough to make a clear point quickly. I don’t need you clogging up my daily tweets with counterpoints to things I’ve said that read like cheap anime subtitles. If I don’t have a chance to respond to you because you don’t make any sense, I don’t care what you have to say to begin with.

And to those of you who speak English as a first language but can’t seem to make yourself understood through Twitter: go back to elementary school, pile. It’s 140 characters. Failing Twitter is like failing bumper stickers.

10. Represent a racist organization (bots aren’t this low).

See #8. With the added caveat that, were it up to me, these morons and their angry stupidity would not be protected as free speech under the Constitution. Oh, and that if I ever meet you people in public, I will go out of my way to TOTALLY RUIN YOUR STUPID SHIT.

Seriously. Porn bots are a step above you people.

11. Represent some group of nonsense-believing cranks (UFO people, fake Lunar landing people, ghost people, Bigfoot or Loch Ness Monster people, antivaxers, Conservative Republicans, hippies, Mormons, Scientologists, etc.). (At least bots spam about things that actually exist.)

See #8 again. Unlike #10, nonsense tweeters don’t make me angry, they just clutter up my daily tweets with what amounts to digital static. I even pity most of them for being so confused. But that said, I have no interest in anything they think, and prefer they stay as far away from anything I’m doing as I can block them.

12. Not Tweet for more than three months (at least the bots pretend to make daily conversation).

This takes us back to the point I made at #3. It’s 140 goddamn characters, people. If you’re too busy to post something at least once every few months, you’re too busy for the Internet. And nothing is more obnoxious than having somebody reply to a tweet I made two months ago. I average about 10 tweets a day. I’ve probably forgotten what I’ve posted about an hour after I’ve posted it. If you're too busy to invest even a few minutes every couple of days to keep current, what the fuck are you doing on Twitter?

13. Tweet anything that has to do with porn that isn’t the simple love of a lonely fan.

Porn love, and a link made in the spirit of porn love, is great. Spam links to malware-infected sites are the reason bots get blocked. Be the first and we can be friends. Be the second, or look like it, and you can eat BLOCK.

14. Be a corporate CEO (I’d rather talk to the bots, thanks).

The only creature that spouts more shill than a bot is the guy who signs the checks of the dickless cannibal who programmed the bot. It’s one thing when a soulless computer program sends me advertising links like it thinks I’m stupid enough to click them: it was made to do this. It has no choice. But when a flesh and blood person, who makes $20 million a year, decides to treat me this way, I not only make a point to not care about his company, but I will go out of my way to tell everyone I know that his company's products are filled with puppy-raping lead.

I have enough people with money talking down to me on a daily basis in real life. I’ll be damned if I put up with it on the Internet. Bend over and get BLOCKED, you slimy sack of st00p1d.

YOUTUBE IS ST00P1D

Sometimes I get the urge to stop being my dad, get a webcam and start posting on YouTube. And then I remember a few things:

1. 99% of YouTube videos are idiots wasting my time, and the other 1% is corporate-owned stuff that will probably get pulled before I click the link from Google. So unless I post corporate-owned stuff that will soon get pulled, I am bound to post videos of me being an idiot, wasting my own time. Twice over, because I also wasted the time making the video that is a waste of my time. So if I post original content on YouTube, I’ll actually be wasting twice as much of my time as I would just watching your shitty video game reviews. Math keeps me safe yet again, while the Internet yet again wastes my life. Go, math.

2. People only post worthless crap on YouTube to impress their non-Internet friends and to make new Internet friends, and I don’t care about doing either. Most of my non-Internet friends are grownups with grownup lives, so the few that actually have Internet access use it to check headlines and sports scores and maybe email Grandma a reminder about taking her blood pressure medication. They don’t care about YouTube, and so won’t be impressed that I’ve glued myself to it.

And allow me to take this opportunity to make a general point about this whole “Internet friends” business. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN INTERNET FRIEND. See, a friend is a person you are emotionally involved with. And you cannot involve yourself emotionally with a guy named GamrD00d7 whose photo is Kaneda’s motorcycle. I don’t care how much you both like Naruto. Dear God, I really don’t. Liking the same bukkake stain anime is not an emotional connection – it is a shared symptom of the stupid.

No one on the Internet is your friend, nor can they ever be your friend. Even if they emoticon you kisses when your dad gets caught taking pictures at the daycare and earns his rapper’s motivation. An emoticon kiss is not an emotional connection – it is a colon followed by an asterisk in cold, apathetic digital font. You have no idea if the person means it. You can’t tell what they’re actually feeling. There’s no emotional involvement here. I type “ROTFL” five or six times an hour. I have never “rolled on the floor, laughing” once in my entire life, and I never will. It’s just my way of showing approval for people who post phrases like “ass-clown,” “penis stench” and “weapons-grade douche rocket.” And half that time, I’m being sarcastic. And for some reason, here on the Internet, the largest playpen for cynical jerk-off douches in the history of the world, no one has come up with a two character expression conveying insult through pretend. If it's possible that someone is only pretending to care about you to make fun of you, and you have no way of knowing that, then they are not your friend.

If for some reason you’re st00p1d enough to meet up with that person out in the real world, and that person doesn’t turn out to be a twitchy psycho with a razor fetish, and you start hanging out with this person on a regular basis and forge an emotional bond that will stand the test of time and music fads, THEN that person becomes your friend. Not your Internet friend. A non-Internet friend, who you risked your life to meet through the Internet.

Get my point yet, Sparkles? I have no interest in making “Internet friends” through YouTube, because one cannot make something that is not an actual thing. Like well-adjusted kids. Or a happy, life-long marriage. Or an original YouTube video that doesn’t waste my time.

And no, I also do not want to make any non-Internet friends through the Internet. Reread the sentence I just typed about the psycho razor fetish thing. Five years ago the only people who posted genuine personal information and/or photos online were your mother, and then the credit card company called wondering when she was going to start paying off that $5,000 in Arabic cell phone cards. As the Internet has expanded and gotten faster, has it gotten any safer? Um, do diseases manifest superhero powers as symptoms after the 200,000th victim? Yet now people not only have no fear of exposing themselves to dangerous strangers, they go to a handful of websites specifically designed to allow them to do this.

I just don’t get it. Of course, I don’t like CBS either, so maybe I’m just a rapist. Who can now come to your house, because you posted your address on FaceBook. Way to go, Fuckmotor.

3. YouTube is populated by inarticulate suburban children between the ages of 12 and 20, because no one younger has anything to post about, and everyone older and poorer has actual things to do. And if there’s one thing I hate more than spoiled WASPy teenagers screeching half-rational opinions about things they don’t understand, it’s their fucking pop music. This is why YouTube has those moron AI filters and moron actual people who spend all day going through the videos and deleting every single one that shows boobs. Legally and morally, children can’t see boobs. I am an adult, however, so I can legally and morally see boobs. So why would I bother with a site where boobs are banned so that the millions of children trading prescription drugs around the digital sandbox won’t learn what a nipple looks like before the state mandates it? You remove boobs, and you’ve removed any interest I may have had in whatever you’re doing. Not that I need to see boobs all the time (WANT is another thing…). What I’m saying is, by banning boobs, you’re telling me you cater to children. And I’ll say the same thing to you that I’ve said to bartenders in “family pubs:” “If I want to get messed up around children, I’ll get off my ass and go start a family. What’s my tab? I’m going to the adult toy store down the street.”

Not necessarily because I need a new Fleshlight. Just because it’s the only place left on the PLANET where two CBS viewers who couldn’t be bothered to “Scotchgard the couch” a couple of times can’t wander in and silently expect me to make sure their spawn don’t crack their heads open on their bad parenting when I’m already too drunk to care. Well, that and the liquor store. But ask to buy a pocket pussy there and your name goes on this list.

4. To shoot anything I’d be happy posting for all the world to see, I’d have to write out a script and edit the footage so I don’t end up looking like you. I type everything now, so it seems like making a YouTube video would be exactly what I’m already doing, plus a whole lot more work. If I just post what I write, and you read it, you’ll be getting exactly what I would be reading on camera, except without my fat face reading it. So why the fuck would you want to see it reading anything?

No one spits on me on the street, at least since I stopped wearing that Ann Coulter t-shirt. But I’m certainly not intriguing to look at. Jack Black and Kevin Smith aren’t either, but people like watching them because they’re funny. Allegedly. You are presently enjoying the extent of my “funny,” so there’s no reason for my head to appear in Flash video. Sorry, fat guy antics from me.

Unless I’m over-caffeinated or drunk. Which leads me to my last point.

5. I’ve ruined my own shit before by sending emails while under the influence of various behavior-altering substances. I'm not going to give myself the chance to do the same thing with Flash video. You’re all very lucky I have this kind of foresight, too. A Bluesader rolling on four tea-and-whiskeys is a Bluesader rolling without his pants.

I hope you all appreciate what I do for you people. You should all be sending me money. I mean, in general. But ESPECIALLY for me not letting you see me naked.

Wait, let me rephrase that. Send me money, or I’m going to take my pants off and dance around on YouTube. Any sense of shame was beaten out of me a long time ago, so this will only hurt you. I’m not kidding here. Let’s see those PayPal numbers, people.

Hmm. Maybe YouTube isn’t so bad after all…

THE MOVIE BLINDNESS IS ST00P1D (AND SHOWS DISABLED PEOPLE GETTING RAPED)

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THE FANTASTIC FOUR ARE ST00P1D

No member of the Fantastic Four is likeable. Even Stan “Eternal Moustache” Lee knows this, and he is the guy who dressed them in for-no-reason blue jumpsuits with giant ‘4’ campaign buttons, an outfit that could not scream “SELF-IMPORTANT DOUCHEBAG” any louder if it were bright green and equipped with an automated klaxon that shrilled “SELF-IMPORTANT DOUCHEBAG” on the eights. If you read a Fantastic Four comic, there is a 90% chance you will be reading about the Fantastic Four fighting alongside somebody else, because even Stan Lee thinks they are so boring and unlikeable that the only way he can stand writing about them is if more interesting heroes are there to take up most of the panel space they would otherwise use to piss everyone off. Since Stan Lee is responsible for the Fantastic Four being assholes, you would think he would just change them if he didn’t like them. But there seems to be an editorial rule over at Marvel (the only one) that says writers can’t change a character from something stupid into something cool unless the new guy is either a Weapon X clone of the old one, a Doom Bot pretending to be the old one, or a Skrull pretending to be the old one, which means, in all three cases, that the new one has to be evil. That seems like a pretty stupid rule to me, but no one asked me when they came up with it, so I guess my opinion doesn’t matter. Yet. Until it does, the Fantastic Four will continue to use their mutant magical space radiation powers to defy physics by both sucking and blowing at the same time, and I will continue to not get paid to point it out to people who do not care. And that is why I write on the Internet. Next paragraph.

It is not just that the members of the Fantastic Four are unlikeable. No, it is almost like that super dose of magical space radiation not only gave them magical space radiation powers, but also magnified their most obnoxious personality traits about ten or twelve thousand times. To demonstrate:

Mr. Fantastic 

Reed Richards, aka Mr. Fantastic, aka The Guy Who Had the Fucking Balls to Actually Name Himself ‘Mr. Fantastic’. Mr. Fantastic has the powers of being super smart and being able to change the size and shape of his limbs, because I guess the same mutated gene controls both intelligence and limb-bendiness in Comic Book Land. But it doesn’t matter all that much, because he hardly ever uses his limb-bending power, except to make his arms and legs all long and twisty so he can tie people up with them. That’s right: Mr. Fantastic has a power that makes him about as effective as an average rope, and the rope has the added bonus of not making whoever is tied up with it feel like their back is being dry-humped by Reed Richards. Since he usually ties up bad guys, maybe the creepy pervert back-humped feeling is the whole point. Which I suppose makes a little sense, except that I find it very hard to believe that the one thing that will finally reduce the murderous, narcissistic Dr. Doom to fat evil genius tears is realizing that Reed Richards’s penis is pressed against the small of his back. Not to say such a thing is not the very essence of creepy – if Reed Richards’s penis were pressed against the small of MY back, you damn well bet I would give up my ambitions for world domination. But I am a lonely, angry little man with a rarely updated website. Dr. Doom is an evil genius in an indestructible suit of armor, who pulverized so many genitals with his massive indestructible metal fists that he became Supreme Leader of a reclusive Slavic principality in the Carpathian Mountains. Which isn’t terribly impressive until you remember that the Carpathian Mountains are the home of Dracula, and that Dracula only lived there because he was once a Slavic prince and when he died, Satan was so afraid of him he would not let him into Hell. People like me are afraid of Reed Richards’s penis pressed up against us – people who manage to maintain autocratic control over a group of people so badass they become vampires by SCARING THE SHIT OUT OF THE DEVIL are not afraid of Reed Richards’s penis. They may be afraid of God, they may be afraid of garlic, but they are not intimidated by a blue guy-rope or that guy’s intimately-close blue guy-rope.

But does Reed Richards care? Oh hell no. Because the only person more egotistical than Dr. Doom and Dracula combined is Reed Richards. Just read the comic. And not even a whole comic. It only takes about two panels of Reed Richards’s speech bubbles to see that he is an insufferable egotistical douchebag who never misses the opportunity to remind everyone how smart he thinks he is. And as if this weren’t bad enough, he talks, acts and looks like Ward Cleaver from Leave It To Beaver, but with an inexplicable blue jumpsuit and magical space radiation powers. He routinely stops using contractions and explains everything in condescending detail, like he thinks everyone around him is at the intellectual level of the Beaver. At least, that is why I do it.

But I write on the Internet, where 90% of everything is porn, and the other 10% is webpages posted by people who think the government is using porn to control our minds. Reed Richards is talking to people who are supposed to be scientists and a space shuttle pilot. Either Reed Richards is an asshole to everyone close to him, or everyone close to him, despite their reputed careers, is retarded. Having read more than several issues of the Fantastic Four, I am convinced it is both. 

Which begs the question: is Reed Richards super-intelligent when compared to normal humans of average intelligence, or is he only a “genius” when compared to the short bus mutants of the Fantastic Four? Remember, this is the “famous mind” who couldn’t impress fucking Richard M. Nixon in Fantastic Four #104. Sure, Magneto and Sub-Mariner working in evil tandem is not a little problem for anyone to solve, but this is the Fantastic FOUR – they outnumber Magneto and Sub-Mariner two super-mutants to one, and one of their mutants is a giant rock monster. And even then the then-President would apparently prefer that someone else, ANYONE ELSE, handle the problem. Richard Nixon never hugged Spider-Man or anything, but he also never called Spidey an incompetent douchebag. And remember, Nixon is our only 20th Century President who employed honest-to-goodness hired goons. That is like the Supreme Leader of Iran saying he’s not going to buy nuclear weapons from you because he thinks you take that religion thing a little too seriously. Clearly, like Richard Nixon, Reed Richards is a condescending douchebag apparently surrounded by idiots. And like Nixon, both are significantly less cool than Spider-Man.

The Invisible Woman

The next obnoxious member of the Fantastic Four is the Invisible June Cleaver to Reed Richards’s Bendy-Ward, Sue Storm. Sue Storm is Reed Richards’s wife and…Sue Storm is Reed Richard’s wife. She has absolutely no personality outside of agreeing with Reed, defending Reed, following Reed around, wondering where Reed is because she misses following him around, laying on her back spread-eagle while Reed yells out his own name in ecstasy, and afterwards, making Reed a delicious sandwich. And then washing the plate when he’s finished. Oh right, she can also turn invisible and create limited force-field bubbles, but as this combination of powers has helped the Fantastic Four defeat a supervillain a total of negative fifty-six times, her being Reed Richard’s wife is arguably much more important to saving the world.

Think I am just being a sexist dick for comedic effect? I challenge you: find me a single page in Fantastic Four history where Sue Storm doesn’t dedicate at least one speech bubble to how awesome and important Reed Richards is, and I’ll buy you an interdimensional super dog from the parallel present. People say that Marvel is more in tune with modern feminism than DC because they have had more super-powered women in their lineup for longer. But Sue Storm is the perfect example of why that argument is stupid. Marvel may put a supposedly super-powered person with boobs in every book they publish, but they don’t get points for feminism if that woman is merely some guy’s doting wife, a lusty object of comic relief, or kidnapper bait. Sue Storm is all three, all the time, so no points for Marvel, no points for the Fantastic Four, and especially no points for Sue Storm. No matter how good her sandwiches are.

(A question: How does a person who can turn invisible and isolate themselves in a six foot force field bubble still manage to get kidnapped and tied up with a non-super-rope nine times out of ten? Maybe I’m missing something because I’m too sexist. Feel free to clue me in, Internet.)

The Human Torch

The next worthless prick in the Fantastic Four is Johnny Storm, Sue’s brother, aka The Human Torch. His powers are setting himself on fire, and being more of a loud-mouth, self-obsessed whole-ass than Reed Richards and Dr. Doom combined (and knowing Marvel, this has probably happened at least six or seven times, and the Skrulls did it as part of a new plan to take over the world, and it failed every time). Johnny Storm is every fratboy you’ve ever failed to get to turn down the Eminem, except that instead of having the superpower of being able to hold down several kegs of Milwaukee’s Best without poisoning his brain, he can set you on fire with a mini-meteor he literally pulls out of his ass. Oh, and he can fly, because if you can set yourself on fire, you can heat the air around you and…thermal updrafts…but it also somehow works in space…and you don’t have to breathe then, either. Or something. I do not possess the fantastic magical space radiation bloated mind of Reed Richards, so I cannot begin to comprehend the awesome nonsensimagical physics at work here. All I know is, don’t tell Johnny Storm to turn down the Eminem, or he might set your underpants on fire with his middle finger.

The Thing

The last member of the Fantastic Four that pisses me off is the aforementioned sentient rock monster, The Thing. Yeah, that’s right. The combined awesomenesses of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (possibly by the Skrulls) couldn’t come up with a better superhero name for a giant orange rock monster than ‘The Thing.’ And they even gave the guy’s pre-radiation alter-ego the name Ben Grimm.

His last name is Grimm, you guys. He’s a giant orange rock monster. And all you can come up with is ‘The Thing?’ Not ‘The Great Grimm?’ Not ‘Grimmrock the Smasher?’ Not even the Best Name Ever ‘Grimmenstein?’ No, he’s just ‘The Thing,’ his outfit is a tiny blue Speedo, and he is pretty much just The Incredible Hulk except that when The Thing punches stuff, orange rock crumbs break off his knuckles. And this is the guy who had, before the dose of magical space radiation, a cool name and was such an awesome Air Force test pilot that he flew spies into Communist Russia and was then promoted to experimental space shuttle captain.

This has got to be the only time in comic book history where a guy was way cooler BEFORE he got turned into a superpowered bash monster.

Understandably then, it is all downhill from here. Despite the fact that Ben Grimm was a famous flying ace before his transformation – and that the transformation didn’t do a damn thing to his ace flying brain – the only job Reed Richards gives him in the Fantastic Four is Official Smasher of Crap. At this point, anyone else in Ben’s position would probably have told Reed Richards to fuck himself sideways and joined Nick Fury’s S.H.I.E.L.D., where they would also no doubt expect him to smash things, but would also no doubt let him fly experimental aircraft. But Reed Richards was Ben Grimm’s best friend, so Ben believes him when he promises to find a cure for Ben’s rock-monsterness. A six year old could tell Ben how full of shit Reed is, since Reed is the very person who wants to exploit Ben’s smashing rock hands against the wide array of enemies he’s made during a lifetime of condescending douchebaggery. And there’s also the little factoid that Ben didn’t even WANT to fly Reed into space for his illegal little experiment in the first place, which the government had torpedoed because they only waste money on space boondoggles kids of Senators come up with. But no, Ben trusts Reed. Even after Reed and Johnny Storm HIGHJACK A SPACE SHUTTLE, and on top of that insist on complicating the thruster fuel specs with a hundred extra pounds of utter non-astronaut-nor-scientist known as The Woman Reed Richards is Fucking. But no, Ben Grimm trusts Reed Richards and always will, even if it means violating federal law, endangering his life by making flying the space shuttle more difficult, and being exposed to gene-raping magical space radiation.

I bet Reed Richards came up with the name The Thing and the little Speedo just to show the world that the giant rock monster was as much his bitch as Sue Storm.

So the pre-Thing Ben Grimm clearly had no self-esteem whatsoever. Now that Ben is The Thing, he should certainly have gained the profound sense of self-worth I assume being giant and indestructible gives someone. But then I remember that this is a Marvel comic, and that in a Marvel comic, superpowers are not cool. In a Marvel comic, superpowers in fact turn you into a persistently depressed angst-hole, who can’t wait to recite poetry about how terrible it is that you can’t work in retail anymore. Unless you happen to be Wolverine. Wolverine is so into being a superhero that he dresses in neon yellow and goes out of his way to challenge thirty foot purple robots to arm wrestling matches. But The Thing is not Wolverine, so while he will fight thirty foot purple robots when Reed Richards orders him to, he takes breaks between crater-punches to Twitter about the cold darkness where his heart should be. And since the Fantastic Four have been around about forty years longer than Twitter, most of The Thing’s tweets have been action-obscuring speech bubbles lamenting his new massive pointy brow ridge and his new tiny orange turtle penis.

I know that complaining about a non-Wolverine Marvel character being whiny is like complaining about a non-Superman DC character trying to be as angry and badass as Batman. But with The Thing, it just does not make any sense. He can throw cars. He is no longer legally obligated to wear clothing in public. No one will ever mess with him for fear of getting a mouthful of broken teeth and orange crumbs. And on top of all that, he even has a girlfriend, a hot blind sculptor who apparently likes a mouthful of orange crumbs. Yes, I know she is blind, and we are supposed to think she only likes Ben because she cannot see how hideous he is supposed to be. But unlike Lee and Kirby, who apparently think all women are utterly shallow and that blind women are also extremely stupid, we understand that there is no way any human being can fuck a ten foot rock monster and hold any delusions about what they look like.

Rereading this paragraph, I realize that being The Thing is now my new ambition, plus or minus the disability of my potential girlfriend, since my years on the Internet have taught me that no matter what horrifying thing is wrong with you, there are at least 10,000 normal, healthy women who cannot wait to fuck you. So The Thing is not a sympathetic character. He is instead a superficial asshole, who has tossed aside what little remained of his personal dignity on the faint hope that his best friend will get around to making him look average and boring again.

I do not care how many cars he can throw, how many times he has stood up to the Hulk, how many thirty foot purple robots he has used as a baseball bat to swat low-flying Skrull ships into Dr. Doom’s Palace of Evil Robot Dracula Cue Lightning Flash. All of this wonderful nonsense is reduced to miserable bullshit the moment he opens his mouth and makes it clear that he thinks he would be having far more fun mowing his lawn in his size thirty-four khakis. Thanks for ruining my fun, The Thing.

I also do not understand why the writers keep making his speech bubbles look like they are coming out of the mouth of a stereotypical 1930s New York gangster who just got off the boat from Sicily. Ben Grimm was an experimental space shuttle pilot. Qualification Number One for that job is being able to speak clearly enough to tell Houston you have a problem.

Maybe he only started talking like that after the exposure to magical space radiation. Maybe the inside of his mouth crumbles apart like his knuckles. But then, would he not choke to death on the crumbs while he slept?

See, this is why I like the X-Men. When I read an X-Men comic, I am too busy watching Wolverine slicing purple robot cocks to wonder if The Thing has to wear a mouth condom to bed so as not to suffocate on his own crumbling epidermis.

The Fantastic Four are fantastically stupid.

BABYLON 5 IS ST00P1D

The nerds I know fall into three categories: Star Trek nerds, Star Wars nerds, and Babylon 5 nerds. By which I mean, that ONE Babylon 5 nerd. I watch Star Trek, and despite all its massive problems, it’s entertaining enough. I’ve seen all the Star Wars movies and aside from the terrible dialogue, they’re okay. I had never seen Babylon 5 save a few odd clips I’d chanced upon in the mid 90s. I’d always changed the channel after about 30 seconds, because I didn’t know what I was watching but it looked like a shitty Star Trek rip-off. I’d felt the same way initially about Red Dwarf, but that was parody and it was funny, at least before it forgot what parody means. Babylon 5 wasn’t parody and was only funny because it was broken. Shitty science fiction parody I’ll take; shitty science fiction rip-off can suck it.

I made the mistake of saying this to the Babylon 5 nerd I know. He got all indignant and demanded I hold my heathen tongue, at least until I’d seen enough of his favorite show to know emphatically why I thought it sucked. Because nerd fights are funny and the first two seasons of Babylon 5 are free on Hulu, I decided to indulge him.

So I’ve watched about four complete episodes of Babylon 5. And I can now say emphatically that Babylon 5 can not only suck it, it can suck it till it explodes in its idiot Star Trek-humping face.

Here’s why.

Babylon 5 is about this giant space station in the future. Like all giant space stations in the future, it looks like someone glued a bunch of broken battleship models together in such a way as to fulfill no practical purpose whatsoever, except maybe as a really kinky dildo for a planet-sized she-demon (a better set up for a science fiction show by far). The thing that sets Babylon 5 apart from all the other future space stations is that the whole thing exists entirely in a computer, as in it’s all CGI, as in it’s all shitty mid-90s CGI. PC space sims circa 1998 have better graphics, and plots, than this show. Now it’s not the show’s producer’s fault that rendering technology wasn’t up to the necessary standards. It’s just the show’s producer’s fault that he thought this didn’t matter, that for some reason he didn’t have to use professionally constructed models like Star Trek was doing at the very same time to make their show not look like…well, shitty Babylon 5.

  

But enough about the shitty special effects. If something is well-written, I’ll excuse the shitty special effects (see The Last Starfighter). But Babylon 5 is not well-written. Which is to say, Babylon 5 certainly had a writer, because even the dumbest actors on earth, improvising for peanuts, would not be this consistently retarded.

Babylon 5 is of course home to a varied cast of alien inhabitants, i.e., a bunch of nobody actors in castoff FMV game space jumpers, lumpy face prosthetics and frightening wigs. When they aren’t busy cleaning the thousands of unnecessary external vents and flashy lights on their ugly CGI space station, they’re having insipid personal problems. It’s like a soap opera, but not in the engaging way Star Trek: Deep Space 9 – the show Babylon 5 is trying hardest to rip off – is like a soap opera. No, Babylon 5 is more like a Mexican soap opera, where the cheap theater sets have been replaced with bad computer graphics, and the language you don’t understand isn’t Spanish, it’s something some guy made up. And instead of eroticism and crying, every story is packed with incessant whining and shots of people filling out space forms on space computers. Or whining about how they don’t want to fill out those forms, or don’t know how. Incessantly.

What is everyone whining and filing space paperwork about? Apparently the race of Lizard People and the race of Napoleon Vampires are going to war, because the Napoleon Vampires used to kick the crap out of the Lizard People, and now the Lizard People want revenge. And for some reason all the other things in the galaxy care about this, so humans and the Bald Elves have to get them to stop. Except that the Bald Elves used to kick the crap out of humans, so humans still hate them and it’s really hard for us to work with them. But we’re randomly allies with them now so we have to pretend we don’t still hate them. Shake thoroughly with ice, and it’s all tense and dramatic and everyone’s conflicted and bitching about all of it all the time.

In the first place, I don’t know why the giant space dildo is called Babylon 5. I guess it’s because the word Babylon is really old and has a ‘y’ in it, so it sounds all epicky to retards, and space names always have to have numbers in them so somebody picked ‘5’. The pilot episode pulls some crap about this Babylon being the fifth Babylon because the first three blew up and the last one just disappeared. Riiiight. Because if you have a gargantuan space resort filled with millions of people and it all goes to shit, you’re just going to pull another trillion dollars out of your ass and set up another one. Four. More. Times.

It reminds me of that part in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Michael Palin is the King of Swamp Castle. Remember that? He explains how his castle is actually his fourth castle, because the first three burned down and/or sank into the swamp. That’s what the people who made Babylon 5 want us to believe happened in their show. Except that their swamp castle is in space, and every time it goes down, millions of sentient creatures and trillions of space dollars go up in iron-smelting flames. Not to mention the damage caused by an eight million ton fused steel brick landing on a nearby moon colony. Four. Fucking. Times.

You heard it right, kids. This is the distant future and humans are supposed to be super-advanced and making out with all these other super-advanced alien races. And with all of their super-advanced powers combined, they are worse at keeping their shit together than a bit character in a Monty Python routine.

Fuck damn, this show is stupid.

In Star Trek they would call the most important people on the show the Bridge Crew. Babylon 5 is on a space station so the place they all hang out is probably not called the bridge. It’s probably called the “Command Unit,” or some other phrase that sounds like something a nerd would call his genitals. So the leads on Babylon 5 are probably called the “Command Unit Crew.” But Babylon 5 couldn’t bribe its way into Star Trek’s paid toilet, so I’ll call the main cast of Babylon 5 the Babylon 5 Bridge Crew.

The Babylon 5 Bridge Crew has names, but I can’t remember all of them because I don’t care about this show, and the ones I do remember are stupid. It has six members, because both the Bridge Crews of the original Star Trek and Star Trek: the Next Generation had six members, and Babylon 5 had the same great idea. After Star Trek had it. Twice. Over twenty years.

These are, in probable order of importance:

Captain Angston Corporatecut, Whiner of the Stars. I don’t know how a flaccid wiener like this could become commander of a Volkswagon, let alone a gigantic space station. Except that this is Babylon 5, and on this show things like this happen. Over and over again. Maybe he fathered some impotent elder statesman’s son. Or knows who did.
Oh, there I go again, coming up with fake stories for Babylon 5 that are infinitely more interesting than anything they ever did on this stupid show! Do you know what it means when someone with my level of Hollywood script writing experience (zero times one-hundred) can’t help but accidentally come up with better ideas than a show that was on television for like five years? It means goddamn it, is what it means.

Vice-Captain Battleaxe Icecooch. When she’s not being a robot powered by liquid bitch, she’s threatening to assault people for…she’s threatening to assault people. When she does this, she and the person she’s threatening raise their eyebrows and smile like it’s a fucking knock-knock joke or something. “Knock-knock, who’s there, I’m a violent psychotic bitch.” Yeah, makes me laugh. In the first episode of Season One she says she’s screwed up because her mother was a psychic and the government forced her to take drugs to stop her eerie brain powers and this of course led to her suicide. But since that sounds like a lie I tell people when they ask me why I’m screwed up, I don’t buy it. Only thing I can figure is that she must be a rape victim who despises men only a little bit more than she despises herself, yet won’t get therapy because she thinks it’ll make her look weak. And everyone knows it and it’s become something of a station-wide joke. If I’m right, that means the producers of Babylon 5 think the untreated emotional trauma of a violent sexual assault is a kick-ass running gag with limitless comedic potential.

I guess that serves the 90s right for demanding more female leads in science fiction. Well, that, and Rob Liefeld.

Chief of Security Squarehead Goofoff. Every space show needs a chief of security, because Star Trek: the Next Generation had two. The first was Tasha Yar, who as a kid got raped by a biracial crack-addled Vietnam War vet alien or something, so that when she grew up she decided to be Batman on a spaceship, only she sucked at it and got killed. The second was Commander Worf, a Klingon raised by humans who acted all tough and snarly to prove to himself and other Klingons that he was in fact all tough and snarly. These were well-rounded characters who behaved in ways that made sense (compared to Image Comics characters, anyway). Of course Babylon 5 has “cutting edge special effects,” so it doesn’t need any pansy-ass character development. CoS Squarehead Goofoff is either bumbling around like a significantly less funny Chief Wiggum, or standing ramrod stiff at all the high-level administrative meetings assuring everyone that he will keep them safe NO MATTER THE COST, GOD DAMN IT. Sometimes he does both in different scenes of the same episode. Perhaps there really are people working in security who are Secret Service agents when they’re not too busy chasing down pie thieves with the other Keystone Kops. But would someone like this ever become Chief of Security of a trillion dollar space port? Especially when he’s the ONLY security officer we ever see? Come on, Babylon 5. Even Kirk had a dozen Red Shirts with phasers on the Swingin’est Ship of the Stars, and the biggest threat he ever faced was his own belligerent incompetence. You really want Squarehead solely responsible for the health and well-being of high level alien diplomats? What if it’s his comic relief hour? He might trip over his own bootlaces and knock Ambassador Pointless Apostrophe into a giant cake. And nothing gives a would-be assassin a bigger hard-on than hearing his target presently has eyes full of whipped vanilla bean. Explains why the plot of every episode of Babylon 5 is about some alien diplomat getting killed on the station. You think they’d stop coming after awhile, or at least insist CoS Goofoff be reassigned. But no. Because that would make sense.

It makes you wonder why the character of CoS Goofoff is on the show to begin with (you know, other than the Star Trek thing). He’s not developed enough for any law enforcement commentary, and he’s not fat or black enough for token comic relief. Which raises another question: why does a space soap opera need token comic relief? Maybe test audiences didn’t find Battleaxe the Twisted Rape Victim as funny as the producers did.
Admittedly, she usually lashes out at poor Squarehead. So I guess that fixes everything. If you don’t know what the word ‘fixes’ means.
Maybe he’s the one who raped her. That would be funny.

Oh, there I go again…!

Blondie the Psychic Nazi Skank. She’s blonde and wears a knee-length skirt and heels – on the fucking space station – so I assume she’s supposed to be the requisite hot one. Relatively speaking, she is. I admit to falling victim to her calculated sashay and that filthy way she narrows her eyes and smirks at everyone wishing her a friendly hello. But the only other women on this show are Battleaxe and that one Bald Elf chick, so I may have been grasping for the longest of the very short straws. After all, her clothes and hair proudly proclaim “Women’s Death Camp Guard,” and the ridges on her throat and her sallow cheeks clearly indicate several years lived quite actively on the wrong side of thirty-five. Not that I’m personally against middle-aged Nazi women skanking it up whenever they’re so inclined. If I’d spent my prime child-bearing years lying to Undesirables about showers, I’d want to spend my free time pumping off the pole too. But the fact that I even have to think about something so fantastically vile means that someone, somewhere, royally fucked up. As if that was still a question on a show where a fat bald guy is suddenly a space alien because you gave him Dracula fangs and a giant peacock tail wig. Jesus Christ.
Oh, and by the way, Blondie has inexplicable psychic powers. Or so the characters keep repeating. I guess the show will get around to actually making this part of the plot when it’s good and fucking ready.

Ambassador Napoleon Vampire. I don’t remember his name or the name of his “race,” but you can be sure both of them have a few unnecessary consonants separated by even more unnecessary apostrophes. The fat bald guy who plays him thinks he’s in the most spectacular stage play ever, so when he isn’t dragging down every scene with overly pronounced, set-chewing emogasms, he’s yanking people around by the lapels and screaming like a pirate with a lisp. If you’ve ever seen a crappy high school production of Shakespeare, you’ve seen your share of frantic lapel yanking. Comparatively, if you’ve ever experienced real life, you’ve probably noticed that no one ever grabs anyone by the lapels for emotional effect, and probably never has without getting their ass swiftly plastered.

But I blame the genre for this nonsense more than I blame the unfortunate wearing the Dracula fangs and a wig that looks like pubic hair fanning out around the stubbiest penis ever. Star Trek itself started this idiot crap back in the 60s. Why do aliens have to be people from crappy high school Shakespeare? They don’t use normal contractions, they wear knee-high boots and jerkins, and they wave their hands around and grab lapels as they’re giving obvious rehearsed speeches. Which would make a little sense if they were proper ambassadors in session. But they do this shit down in the station lounge. “Who ordered the Jack-and-Coke?” “I did, fair maiden, and beseech thee kindly to hand it o’er, for I am much famished for yon chill succulent succulence.” “Okay. Here you go.” “[Grabs her lapels] It’s WARM, curse you! Take it back, forthwith! I have never been so insulted in my two Earth-centuries life! S’woons!”

Watch the writers of Babylon 5 sue me for quoting more than 3/4ths of a scene. And then the writers of Star Trek will sue them for their piece of the action.

If you get that last joke, you’re a fucking astronaut. Now quit smirking, nerd.

Ambassador Shellless Turtleman. Not only does Ambassador S. Turtleman fulfill every expected Shakespeare alien stereotype, he’s also driving the “Persistent Usual Alien Suspect” train. You know exactly what I’m talking about. Thirty seconds into every show you know he and his evil race of evil Lizard People are 253% responsible for whatever this week’s evil crisis is. And you also know that it’s going to take everyone else on the show fifty TV-punching minutes to finally quit it with the moral relativistic hand-wringing and pin every murder on the sneering lizard man and his sneering lizard man superiors. And then promptly forget the whole thing, so that when the bastards kill someone else at the start of the next show, it’ll take another fifty minutes to “figure out” who did it. While we the viewers are left to figure out whether this whole idiotic process is supposed to tell us something about who we really are as people, or if it’s just aggressively bad writing.

I love it when, after awhile, the writers finally realize how stupid this is and try to have the characters explain it away. “I know the Lizard People seem persistently evil to us,” the commander will say, “and I know they’re responsible for every single fucking problem we’ve ever had up here, and probably always will be. But,” the douchebag frowns, “diplomacy is a delicate process with blah blah blah U.N., ancient Earth Wars, talky talky greater understanding, and have sex with them, in the name of interstellar peace.” And everyone just nods like they know there isn’t time to do anything about it before the short shuttle arrives to take them all back to the satellite for assisted living.

“In the name of interstellar peace,” Commander Missing Chromosome? Know what promotes interstellar peace? Not letting the fucking Lizard People kill the janitor every time he happens upon their plans to conquer all the surrounding Spice mines! Doing something a bit more proactive than shaking your head when you find another ten children’s carcasses stuffed down the garbage chute, covered in Lizard People drool! If the fucking Lizard People are murderous genocidal jerk-offs, then no, we don’t have to be nice to them in the name of interstellar peace. In the name of interstellar peace, we need to eject the Lizard People’s ambassador from the station and declare war on the fucking Lizard People, and nuke their homeworld a half-dozen times until they finally see the benefit of not using other people’s mouths as toilets whenever they’re so inclined! I level the same complaint against the game Mass Effect, which proudly rips off as much of Babylon 5 as they can legally get away with: human beings would not realistically put up with this shit. We don’t put up with it from other humans, so we’re ESPECIALLY not going to put up with it from people who look like the spawn of Godzilla and Jamie Lee Curtis. I don’t care how many corvette gunners the Lizard People are rumored to have in their space fleet. We’re not going to shrug our shoulders and keep Ambassador Turtleman under “closer surveillance” in his compartment adjacent to the station commander’s. Ambassador Turtleman kills someone on our turf, and he’s just earned himself a helmetless trip through the airlock. And if his “people” think it’s worth shooting about, welcome to Genocide Alley, motherfuckers.

Think I’m joking? Ever seen a dire wolf or a cave bear or a Neanderthal in your back yard? No you haven’t. That’s because this one time the three of them put their toothy mauls together and came up with a plan to eat this caveman’s wife. You’ll notice how Commander Caveman didn’t shrug his shoulders and tsk, tsk, tsk the cave bear ambassador for not minding intercavern peace.

Fucking Christ giblets, this show is stupid.