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Alright, before I start, I've made the decision to be a little more fair. Anyone can
tell someone they suck, especially when they really do suck. That, however,
never actually drives the point home. Basically, everyone who makes it to the age of 18
has been told by half the people they ever met that they suck. A lot. It's spilling water
onto a duck's back.
What's harder to deal with is having evidence that you can pull a Saint Bernard through
a small condom and still have enough suck to drain all the gas from an F-350. And, like all
evidence, there has to be some falsifiability. Which is to say, that it works a lot
better if, rather than me grabbing a whole bunch of websites and pointing out all the
reasons why they should never have been shared with the public, I instead use a scoring
system and even say nice things. That way, the people that end up here know they
are being singled out, are a problem, and are not normal in any way, AND I'm not just
"attacking their genre", so to speak. Even when I am.
SO. Here's my rubric:
Length: To the point, Detailed, Sunday Afternoon, Novel, a Tome of Semicoherent Ramblings
(TSR)
Lucidity: Together, Left Field, Fringe, Tinfoil, Featherstitched Bagelmancy Incantations
(FBI)
Readability: English, Bad English, L337, Sanskrit, mIster Rogers is Crying (mIRC)
Annoyance: Tolerable, Giffy, Midirable, Hampsterdance, Tubgirl/Goatse Related Incident
(TGRI)
Accuracy: CNN, X-Files, Farscape, Adult Swim, Any Terrible Fanfic(ATF)
Now, to get started. Today, I bring you
Supernatural Service.com. This site can take your hard-earned cash and turn it into
funky lovin' using magic. Sure, you could cut out the middle
man and hire yourself a prostitute, but why go through the ethical dillema when you can ask
a few daemons from the eighth layer of hell to destroy a few villages and gather enough
power and anguish to get Suzie to ask you to the dance Saturday? Prostitution is dirty,
but communing with the dead through ancient dark rites and currying favors from eldritch
deities, that's gotta be kosher.
I guess if you want to spend $99 on a wish, I'm not here to judge.
Now to judge.
Length: Detailed. My scrollbar is a long rectangle (as opposed to the thin sliver shape it
takes on when I visit timecube), and hitting page down
5 times gets me through all the text on the opening page. That's a good thing.
Lucidity: Fringe. At first glance, this is just an obvious scam. Upon closer examination,
however, we find that, like most practitioners of Gardnerian religions, the webmasters
at Supernatural Service.com have convinced themselves they're actually helping people by
taking a hundred bucks and returning less self-esteem than beating a cripple at DDR gives
you. A cripple with no eyes. However, they do offer a money back guarantee. They take themselves
too seriously to be considered sane, but aren't loony enough yet to have decided to cast off
their-okay-your material posessions, and can still understand why people wouldn't buy into
it immediately.
That, and I forsee their "1900 lovers reunited to date" figure ending up in a police report
one day.
Readability: Bad English. If Star Trek's Data married a level 12 palladin and had a Dalek
for a son/daughter/trashcan with flailing arms, it would get along well with the webmaster
from Supernatural Service. Even the endorsements are corny. "I used your Fidelity Spell to
completely stop my husband from cheating and looking at other women"? Material Component:
Bonbons, Verbal Component: Oprah. It's straight out of Second Edition.
Annoyance: Hampsterdance. I hate those Gardnerians (Or "Wiccans" or "Druids" or "Pagans" or "I eat
things I find in my front yard") that take advantage of people. Don't get me wrong, your
garden variety (sorry) wiccans are A-okay in my book; it's the ones that want to play doctor
that get my goat. They aren't performing a service; they're preventing people from finding
real help. Here's what I mean:
Pretend you have a broken arm.
Now pretend there's a doctor fifteen feet away.
Now pretend there's a bunch of morons passing around a fake dagger and chanting things in a
circle between you and the doctor.
In a few minutes, that's going to be one busy doctor.
As far as I'm concerned, that's worth almost all the gif animations and annoying midis in
the internet.
Accuracy: Farscape. They make no attempt, other than their money-back guarantee (which they
can basically refuse at-will, since they weren't providing a demonstrable service in the
first place), to prove they do, well, anything at all. However, I don't have the cash to
blow proving these guys aren't really vampire werewolves with bags full of magical lamps and
unicorns and Yu Gi Oh cards, and I don't suggest you try it either. And, they're at least
sticking to run-of-the-mill, well-documented tripe.
Before I go, I want to leave you with
One final thought: The webmistress' name is Angelina Maria Carra, and her friends call
her Angel. That leaves Maria Carra.
Does ancient Druid Mariah Carrey deserve a new car?
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