Mythville

Why Things Suck

By Douglas McDaniel

A whole genre of Web sites have sprung up around that word, turned into an acceptable part of our vernacular, most certainly, by that bratty Bart Simpson. Someday soon, quite likely, every goofball geek with an attitude will be posting a site at a dot-sucks domain address.

The worst of these sites, which turn deconstructive criticism into an art form, are Worst of the Web and Waste of Bandwidth .There is, of course, the satire newsletter, Suck, which actually doesn’t.

Others really, really suck. They are going to have to promote themselves. One would suppose the operators of suck sites would make excellent administrators of national, state and local governmental agencies, if only because they have plenty of time on their hands.

They would probably jump at the idea. According to the home page for Waste of Bandwidth, “There is no government agency dedicated to the content review of Web sites.”

PC in Dis-Geist: Take That, Jack
Review of the PC Game: “You Don’t Know Jack: Louder! Faster! Funnier!” (Sierra, Windows/Macintosh, ESRB Rating: Teen)

Speed, as any interactive gaming designer knows, is addictive. Yet, while most PC games involve hacking at ghouls by hyper-fast clicking with your mouse pad, You Don’t Know Jack games force the interfacee to read fast, think faster and hit the buzzer as if the index finger extended from the temporal lobe.

Such thinking quick on your pants can be a humbling experience and is therefore excellent therapy for most highbrow wonks. Jack’s high-culture multi-media blitz can reduce the local Trivial Pursuit champion into a puddle of simpering goo (and thus, a civic service is performed).

However, earlier editions were refreshingly irreverent and graphically revelatory. The latest offering of this ersatz offline quiz show dubbed “Louder! Faster! Funnier!” is making an irrelevant claim.

What was once an astonishingly hip mind-melt in a world that can never get enough madcap humor is now certainly faster but no funnier, probably less so.

Such is the speed of change in the digital realm.

And it’s hard to understand how more bratty volume is an improvement. Visually, it’s a been there, done that, and the gag writing is downright sophomoric. Quick, what’s the cure for “Saturday Night Live” Sucks disease? Answer: Bring back the Samurai Guy.

And the winners of this week’s You Are Earl awards are…

Who knows what new wave of Web-based insanity might become as necessary to our lives as bottled water or breath-freshening mints for dogs? Somebody thought something called Yahoo was stupid once, right?

The proprietors of Dumb Laws seem to have the legal system pretty much figured out. It’s a rich storehouse of useless legalese. Another contribution to weird niche sites thoroughly details how to pottie-train your cat (www.rainfrog.com/mishacat/toilet.shtml). That may seem overly specific, unless your cat isn’t pottie-trained.

Once humans get pottie-trained, they can really make the Web work for themselves at Best Toilets----a database of public restrooms in New York, Boston, Chicago and Washington D.C. (http://www.besttoilets.com/). It may top the list as one of the buzz sites of the summer, Web utility, after all, being all the rage.

There’s something timeless about the whole thing.

At Gentle Hints (www.gentlehints.com) you can send a person anonymous suggestions to improve themselves. Another one, the Abuse-a-Tron (www.upstart.xe,com/abuse/abuse.shtml), offers insults to each visitor to keep them humble, depressed, and, of course, powerless to make changes (at least not without the help of Gentle Hints).

You might be laughing now at dancing digital hamsters, cheeseburger dissection instructions or dot coms for cows, but someday soon we just might be asking these electronic entities to deliver our meals, give stock tips or attend to our most intimate affairs. They may even be able to balance our checking accounts. As if that’s possible …


Douglas McDaniel is a senior editor at Access Internet Magazine (www.accessmagazine.com), and contributing writer to G21.net and Disinfo.com. E-mail: dmcdaniel@accessmagazine.com