Retro Yakking

Regular readers will be getting used to these ‘…is stupid‘ posts, a series of articles aggressively criticising a website, item or group of people whilst conveniently ignoring the good elements of said entity. They’re a bit of a cross between The Encyclopedia of Stupid and James Rolfe’s ‘You Know What’s Bull****‘ series, except with more of a northern twist.

It is widely accepted that one of the first web users to compile what is now known as a ‘blog’ was student Justin Hall at Justin’s Links from the Underground. Though he wasn’t the very first blogger, he certainly became one of the most ‘famous’ on the early web, notably for his 1994 guided tour of the web.

Hall’s blog still runs to this day, and is a perfect example of what a blog is: a load of opinionated nonsense that not many people outside your immediate circle of family and friends would give the time of day. Except Hall’s family was the immediate online community.

A blog that transcends such boundaries is a relative rarity these days: research suggests that 97.3% of all weblogs on the internet contain completely pointless information of no use to 99.9recurring% of the world’s population. The common blog has a poor reputation, and for good reason. The statistics seem to prove the majority of bloggers are goths and social outcasts, sometimes both; the number of bad blogs far outweigh the good ones, so they really aren’t worth your time.

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I think we’re about due for another dose of opinion very thinly masquerading as fact, namely the latest entry in Retro Yakking’s tongue-in-cheek ‘…is stupid’ series.

To reiterate, these posts take a website, item or (in this case) celebration and pick it apart, whilst conveniently ignoring the many good points of said thing. Confused? Go to the Encyclopedia of Stupid for more of the same. Still don’t get the idea? No? Never mind.

So apparently 5th November is also called Guy Fawkes Night, at least according to Wikipedia, but I’ve always known it as Bonfire Night, or ‘Bommy Neet’. For those who haven’t heard of this ‘celebration’, it’s a massive excuse to stick fireworks up peoples’ bottoms and just generally blow stuff up. Brilliant, eh? Think of it as Thanksgiving without the turkey and in-laws.

But it isn’t all fun and games. Some, mainly firemen, might argue that it’s the worst night of the year, and I tend to share this view. Not because I’m an old cynic who would put Ebeneezer Scrooge to shame, rather I find it a tired old traditional piece of poopy that belongs in the seventeenth century.

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This is another of those ‘…is stupid’ posts that addresses the flaws in a particular website, item or entity whilst conveniently ignoring the many positives said thing has to offer. It’s the second such article, following on from last week’s Twitter post, so I suppose that makes it an official series now.

Anyhow, get ready for more nonsense you’ve heard hundreds of times before only worded slightly differently and with one or two pop culture references thrown in there for good measure.

Everyone is always banging on about how Wikipedia is so awesome. Not a day passes without the mainstream media reporting how founder Jumbo Whales broke a nail, choked on a pretzel or broke up with his girlfriend via the site. Yes, everyone’s favourite free online encyclopedia has its good features, but sometimes you get the feeling it’s built up to be something it isn’t - namely the greatest thing since sliced luncheon meat. In a rational world, that would be nigh on impossible.

Because for its vast expanse of knowledge and devotion to the dispersion of information — which, I will admit, is a very noble and worthy cause –  it’s essentially just a gigantic forum with thousands of moderators and hundreds of trolls. As everyone knows, forums are for geeks and people telling newbies to ‘Google it or GTFO’, and Wikipedia is just one such community that ‘got lucky’ and made it to the big time. The really big time.

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Welcome, yakkers, to a (perhaps) new series of biased, opinionated posts that pick out the annoying parts of a particular item, website or entity whilst conveniently ignoring the many wonderful aspects of said thing. Inspired by the criminally underrated Encyclopedia of Stupid, it’s basically a load of opinionated tosh thinly disguised as ‘humour’, so you can take it or leave it. I’d really prefer you take it though, it’s rather s a lot of baggage to be carrying around the Internet.

Now, we’ve all heard of blogs, and if you haven’t then I will tell you for free that the website you are currently reading (yes, that’s this one, not some other dodgy site you’ve got open in another tab) is a blog. As you’ll be able to tell, it’s all about opinions and people jabbering on about how the world sucks just for the sake of venting their spleen. Well, imagine said format condensed into 140 characters and you have the anal microblogging dump that is Twitter.

This isn’t just a free Internet texting service, this is a mega-hyped, uber-juiced up texting service on speed. Here’s how it works.

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