19 Reasons Buzzfeed Sucks

Buzzfeed sucks. If that statement offends you, you’re what’s wrong with America. If you don’t know what buzzfeed is (count yourself one of the lucky few), it’s a self-described “snapshot of the viral web in real time.” Basically what that translates into is a bunch of ADHD, zero-thought-required, pandering bulls*** (asterisks make it classy). It takes statements so generic and effortlessly digestible that they barely qualify as original thoughts, wraps them up in some easily google-able pics, tosses in some cat .gifs and voila, one internet. At best it’s a topic statement without the accompanying paragraph, at worst it’s an endless stream of tabloid-magazine cover headlines with even less intellectual content. If mental stimuli were diagrammed like the food pyramid, buzzfeed would be the “fats and sugars” section way at the top that’s supposed to make up only the tiniest fraction of your daily food intake…but just like the actual food pyramid, Americans refuse to exert even the smallest amount of willpower and instead consume as much as they can (“What if we put ice cream IN the rootbeer so I don’t lose those precious seconds between taking bites of dessert and slurping down soda! What do you mean diabetes is a thing?”) and as a result our mental obesity is almost as out of control as our country’s physical obesity (though less immediately outwardly visible).

such buzz, very feed

Buzzfeed capitalizes on all the worst traits of modern quantity-over-quality internet culture and contributes nothing of its own. This is evidenced by the fact that the most popular posts on buzzfeed’s site are their arbitrarily-numbered lists. Lists of what, you ask? Of everything (the 15 most ridiculous world leaders of all time). Of anything (20 reasons why going to the gym is a huge waste of time). Of nothing (20 doodles that show what we’re all thinking during business meetings). Essentially buzzfeed thinks so little of its readership that not only does it acknowledge the shallowness of its audience, it actually highlights it and throws it back in the face of that selfsame audience…and they don’t care! If a real life person condescended to you like that, you’d punch them in the genitals, but because a website has the audacity to publish the “51 Colorful and Delicious Ways to Eat Spring Vegetables” (I’m sorry, do you mean SALAD? Are you just describing what a salad is in 51 variations? Look man, I am a tax-paying adult, you can just say SALAD, ok?), you’re all like “Wow my three favorite flavors: spring, delicious AND colorful; and because it has vegetables in the title this counts as my workout for the day! More Ovaltine please!”

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Ten for Ten: It’s Good to be the King

Ten years ago is a nice, around number, ripe for reminiscing. It is with that in mind that I present to you the start of an ongoing series I’m calling Ten for Ten — basically I take something really cool, underrated, badass, or just really worth remembering from ten years ago and tell you about it here, a decade past its prime (hashtag: topical). You may even notice similar themes pop up on the 20th and 30th of each month, too. Because as a child I was always told to recycle and they never said that concept doesn’t apply to gimmicks, too.

Two-double-ought-three was the year where the sequel finally became king; properties like The Matrix: Reloaded and The Matrix: Revolutions, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Bad Boys 2, X-2 (the X-men movie), 2 Fast 2 Furious all did outrageously well and as a result the moviemaking industry decided to slowly phase out all non-sequels/remakes by the year 2020 (trust me, it’s coming…or have you not seen the trailers for The Fast and the Furious 6, Top Gun 3D, Die Hard 4, or heard about the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie getting greenlit?).

But in a year where both twitter AND facebook hadn’t been invented yet and Netflix was still MAILING disc to its client base (I bet if video streaming had never been created the US Postal Service would still be delivering on Saturdays), what else were people to do besides go out and see movies? Talk? Yeah right, good one Dr. Phil. However amidst the turmoil of the pre-internet-addicted era, one 2003 sequel stands out above the rest…some would even go as far to say that it spawned the “threequel” craze that followed soon after (though I’m sure Star Wars, Back to the Future, and Indiana Jones franchises would disagree). I’m referring of course to The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.

Like a boss.

How I Lost All My Followers

Special disclaimer for attractive girls: good news, none of what I’m about to say applies to you, so you can just skip ahead to the end or read another of my posts or go back to taking selfies or whatever it is you do between getting hit on and tanning.

Everyone else, buckle in, because you need to hear this. I might’ve just unfollowed you on Twitter or Instagram or Google+ (ha just kidding about that last one, I don’t even know how to activate Google+…unless wait, is this it? Are we on Google+ right now? Is me typing this going to be in one of their sad commercials?).

I love you.

(I figure if they do use this in a Google+ commercial, me typing “I love you” is the part they’ll wanna use, for the strong emotional context it provides. I don’t really love you, but I do like you, and I’m glad we’re friends. Unless we’re strangers, but that’s cool too because it’s the internet and nothing bad ever happens from meeting strangers on the internet)

But I digress.

My First Biography

A lot of you know that I do some professional writing outside of this blog. I’ve had a couple plays published among other things, but I’ve always wanted to give being a biographer a try. A huge influence in my life was the late Steve Jobs, a polarizing visionary who significantly affected the 20th and 21st centuries. Unfortunately, right around the time I was shopping my Steve Jobs bio around, Walter Isaacson released his own so-called “authorized” version of Mr. Jobs life, and just like that, the market for my book was gone

Even though I may not be an “authorized biographer” or a “legal citizen of the United States” I thought you might still like to read an excerpt from my own Steve Jobs biography. I really took my research skills to a new level with this project, and I think we can all agree that what my work lacks in authorization, it makes up for in ambition. And really, isn’t that what Steve would’ve wanted? Anyway, here’s the first few pages so you can decide for yourself…

Steve: The Untold Story

Topical References: A Review of 1980 SNL

I always try to keep these things under 500 words, to make them more accessible to you ADHD kids with your glowsticks and your Kardashian sisters and your pogs to distract you. Out of the 135 posts I have on here, I’ve been successful exactly…zero times. But like I always say, one-hundred-and-thirty-sixth time’s the charm.

Saturday Night Live (or, to use the abbreviation I invented for it, SNL) is starting its 38th season, making it America’s longest-running television show (unless it’s not, I didn’t feel like fact-checking that). If you’re Amish and have never seen the show (yet somehow have a computer, an internet connection and are reading this blog), SNL is a sketch-comedy/musical show whose general premise is to put a celebrity in wacky situations for 90 minutes and hope the supporting cast of funny people around them can make a handful of the sketches bearable. And twice per episode they cut away to the musical guest du jour. Some casts are more successful at this than others, and I could probably crank out a pretty healthy 12,000-word article trying to rank each years’ casts in order from best to worst, but man does that sound like a lot of work. Maybe some other time.