The Downfall of Horse_ebooks

"Meet Trouble, the incorrigible rogue colt that refuses to be ridden but later goes on to discover deep within himself the... most dreadful thing that can ever happen to a horse owner... BLACK FURY... ...AND much, much."
— Horse E. Books

That's how the stories used to go, brilliant disconnected snippets resolving over a day into a sliced-up narrative or one cobbled together by the reader, through his or her playful imagination. Along with hysterically funny sudden interjections, like a harmlessly crazy person on a street corner, that's what we used to get, before we supposedly lost Horse_ebooks, when something changed, almost imperceptibly.

I always wanted to call it "Horsey Books," thinking it was a play on words. The actual name is "Horse_ebooks," with or without the space, which is what you find on its Twitter feed, and which is probably just coincidence. Spam usually isn't punny. SomethingAwful.com's Johnny "Docevil" Titanium first wrote about the account and gave the skinny on it thus:

SomethingAwful: Youtube and Vlogging Every Day in April

Every year, thousands of Youtube users participate in VEDA, "Vlog Every Day in April." While its purpose might be to promote community ties, compel users to practice making Youtube content and, of course, drive up interest and pageloads on Youtube itself, it mostly turns into a horrible collision between vanity and inaptitude. Many of these people have nothing to communicate but, on top of that, lack the means to communicate anyway. The question is: why do they do it? Why expose themselves for so little?

Mr. Destructo book and film reviewer Mark Brendle attempted to answer this question, and eventually I tagged in to try my best to help understand these often accidentally funny, alarming and vulnerable people. It's at once a heartening and disheartening spectacle. People yearn to connect, dazzled by the possibility of finding accidental celebrity just for being themselves — educated by a television culture that runs on such a self-evident and free-form paradigm — but they lack the means to make a connection, as well as ideas alluring enough to establish one with others. Also, the videos are pretty funny.

Click here to read the article at Something Awful.

Special thanks to Andrew Miller for arranging the numerous embedded VEDA Youtubes, as well as Kak, JHVH-1 and BlastYouVileWoman for finding many videos and, lastly, Beowulf LaGrange and Chandelier Stuntin (aka Woodmuffin) for writing blurbs for the article.

SomethingAwful: In Defense of Gringo Star

Possibly the ultimate talisman of uncoolness when it comes to music is finding out someone's dad likes it. As a result, the term "Dad Rock" has sprung up in online music-discussion communities as a cultural dealbreaker and devastating dismissal of the worth of a piece of music. Unfortunately, the term is almost meaningless. It's a term that defies age, aging and the musical content itself.

Nothing brought this to the fore quite like trying to talk about the Atlanta-based garage rock band Gringo Star, who manage to both be awesome and to have a sound that, when described online, invites the "Dad Rock" condemnation like no other. Click here to read the article and enjoy yet another example of why Pitchfork Media is full of shit.

SomethingAwful: The Emmys Are for Idiots, Part I

Unless you're the low man on the totem pole at William Morris or Creative Artists Agency and hoping a darkhorse-candidate client is about to walk away with the gold, you probably have no business caring at all about the Emmys. (Well, maybe you design atrocious-looking dresses.) They're historically hidebound, arbitrary and mostly gutless. So, if you're a sophisticated person with intelligence and taste, you've probably been having pointless, impassioned and highly detailed internet arguments about them for the last week anyway.

The Emmys are for idiots, and because I love television and so easily get sucked into arbitrary and pointless evaluative contests, they're just the thing for me. Click below, on the last remaining BORT license plate in stock, to find out why the history of the Emmys has me thinking about torture, Night Court, edelweiss and a centuries-old pandemic of Helen Hunt. Then check back next week for Part II, in which I explain why the 2010 awards were just as bad as every other year.


Continued in Part II.

SomethingAwful: Meet Miss Destructo!

Sometime last year I was on AIM* with occasional contributor Rigamarock, killing time by posting links to weird websites and then trading one-liners about them. I'm not really sure how I was finding these sites. I know one showed up on a Google Image Search for argyria, the blue-skin condition that libertarians get from drinking too much colloidal silver to show the FDA that it isn't so smart. The others were more random-chance sorts of things, like when you just type in words and add .com to the end of them, like, "PresbyterianHorse" or "FiestaHitler" or start entering random search terms like, "Rowdy Maureen Dowdy" or "Climbing to the top of Mount Groin on [Your Name Here] Just Topped My Bucket List."

Because I was screwing around, I typed in the words, "MrsDestructo.com." No luck. I tried, "MissDestructo.com." What I found was breathtaking. Until then, I had been certain that my wife was not a lifestyle blogger. I was so, so wrong.

But for the rest of that story, you're going to have to keep reading at SomethingAwful.
___________________
* — For the dads reading, that's short for AOL Instant Messenger, a chat client. AOL, of course, is short for "America Online," the dial-up service that, for a period in the 1990s, you thought was the entire internet.

SomethingAwful: DEATH PANEL

Friends, if you're anything like me, you spend your days hoarding ammunition in expectation of the day that the liberal-socialist occupation government rounds you up in the dead of night, blindfolds you with a hood made out of pulped copies of the second amendment and takes you off to die in a FEMA Health Camp. I don't think we as Americans can sit idly by as this specter of totalitiarianism threatens our way of life with math and atheism. That's why I ask you now to view this very important message at SomethingAwful.com outlining the dangers facing all right-thinking people. Please take action before it's too late!

John Boehner
A Bunker, 2010

'BZZTMONDO: Latest Tech Newzzt'

I meant to put up a link to it last week and then kept forgetting, but I contributed a gag to this piece on SomethingAwful.com. Anyone who's spent any amount of time reading Gawker Media probably recognizes the format, and frequent readers of Gizmodo or Kotaku are probably groaning in recognition. It's one of those things that probably works better the more steeped you are in tech news.

Two and a Half Mensch: How HuffPo and CollegeHumor Missed a Fat Comedy Target

Today's piece focuses on an inadvisable tactic. Huffington Post, which cannot generate humor on its own, farmed out the funny to another website. This is a bad idea. When you don't know what funny is, contracting for it is a disaster. It evokes an image of a newly rich and hapless software engineer calling a contractor with only a P.O. Box for an address and saying, "I want new floors in my house and I only have $50,000. Is that enough for floor? It is! By George R.R. Martin's beard, what luck!"

Still, they ran a takedown of the most popular sitcom in America, Two and a Half Men, with a groan track of the show produced by CollegeHumor.com. The only problem was, the track wasn't funny. You couldn't expect HuffPo to know that, but CollegeHumor screwed the pooch. You can't take aim at a beast this big and stupid and then miss. It only draws attention to yourself. Now the beast has something to run at and may also be aroused. CollegeHumor missed.