The Best of Something Awful (2003 Edition)

Best of 2003!God I am so burned out on trying to be funny. Day and in and day out the Something Awful crew works tirelessly to make you laugh. Usually you chuckle, sometimes rarely you guffaw, and more often than not you are seized by the grave injustice of a joke that didn't rub your bikini area the right way and you fire off an angry e-mail. Fuck this; it's burning too much of my energy up. I hardly have time to wash myself, I never shave anymore, and I look like I was rejected from a police lineup for a hobo murderer because I was too unkempt. I need a day off and I'm taking it now! TV shows get away with it. They just recycle clips from old episodes with a thin plot tying them all together like "the last things that flash through Theo's dying brain" or "what Marsha Brady remembers while being indoctrinated into a sub-culture of satanic rape rituals".

We've produced so much material that it should be easy pickings to distill the best into a single update and regurgitate it to you fine folks with little effort on my part. The "little effort on my part" is the central phrase there. After copying and pasting this cookie cutter piece of shit together I'm going to shave and take a nap. Maybe brush my teeth too; this accretion of barnacle-like nicotine spurs has got to go.

January of 2003 - Integral Writes Incoherent Shit About PatriotismBest of 2003!Fan favorite and lying harpy Emily "Integral" Riegel returned to the plentiful well of incoherent rants about patriotism in January of 2003 when she compared George W. Bush to "a crab taped to a skateboard with bottle rockets stuck to its shell". I could spend paragraphs dissecting the various schizophrenic digressions in the piece, but instead I'll let her speak for herself and you can make the call.

War on Terror? More like war on the nation's waistline. U-S-A! U-S-A! Am I right? The last time we went to the Mid-East we came back with a hairpie the size of Denver that disgorged fire-breathing Russian midgets on the unsuspecting townsfolk of Ethnia. Why am I saying Ethnia so much? BECAUSE IT'S ALL I KNOW! I am secretly Ethnian, I've harbored Ethnians in my heart. U-S-A! U-S-A! God my parents are so crazy! They are just bonkers which is totally unlike little old me being a bastion of sanity, truth, and coherent comedic updates. Did I mention I was abducted by aliens?

Well, that's all I'll include from her. I can't say any of us here on the staff will miss her very much with the possible exclusion of Reid "Frolixo" Blaskowitz who made big bank supplying her with a wide array of prescription anti-psychotics.

January of 2003 - Geist Editor Writes Seven Pages of Compound Sentences About Hitler

Being the most hated writer on Something Awful made it easy to pick out an update to include. I just went through my e-mail and looked for the article I had written that had generated the largest number of flame mails. My late-January piece "My Dream Date With Hitler" sent some 132 people rushing to their copies of Outlook Express to reproduce their burning rage in two and three hundred word rants about my stupidity. This included three members of the Jewish Defense League, one of whom described my article as "the worst affront to the Jewish people since Crystal Nacht". I wonder what got them so hot under the collar?!

I'm generally not attracted to men, but my God something about Hitler just drives me absolutely batty! That dramatic sweep of hair across his brow, like he just tossed his head and there it fell, a cascade of black like the velvet curtain of night. I want him to take me on the hood of a King Tiger, its 1400 horsepower engine revving as he violates the virginal secrets of my Eagle's Nest. I picture it like those glorious mass rallies the Nazis used to have. There he is lovingly pounding away at my second front while legions of goose-stepping Aryans march past and salute our union. Just as Hitler is about to empty his tiny ubermenschen into the expanse of my Liebe-raum a wing of Stukas will fly overhead, their sirens howling in synchronicity with the primal cries of pleasure from Der Fuehrer. My god, what a man!

I'm not proud I wrote it. Hell, I don't even remember writing it. That was probably during one of my tequila and amyl benders where I would rant for hours and only pause to beat off to blurry aerial photos of Treblinka.

February of 2003 - Greasnin Has Never Done Anything Funny

Sorry, I have nothing wacky or strange about him to recount. Most of his updates are the equivalent of reading the ingredients on a tube of toothpaste while you're taking a shit. Maybe in the next year he'll do something hilarious like die of torso cancer or something.

February of 2003 - Frolixo Admits to Being in Love with Greasnin

Best of 2003!Ried "Richards" Mr. Fantastic is the latest addition to our hip and youth-targeted Something Awful team, but that doesn't mean he hasn't had enough time to have some memorable moments here on the front page. In fact Frolixo is a real up-and-comer in the realm of "crazy posts" and "drama". He started his career with some adorable pig-tail pulling of freak head Greasnin, and finally this playful flirtation was revealed as love in late February.

When Greasnin isn't busy feeling up nuns and drawing erotic pictures of barnyard animals he spends his time writing articles for Something Awful about wizards or "world's blingingest butts" or…I can't go on with this charade. For months I have been thinking of nothing but Ben "Greasnin" Platt. Thoughts of his beautiful bald head and those soft kissable lips float through my head at all times. I want him…no, I want to be with him, forever! Greasy, if you're reading this, please be my special life partner. I know a Unitarian who will marry us and everything. You can be my June bride, or I can be yours, whichever you prefer. If you think I'm kidding I have written this poem for you.

Ben, rhymes with men,
You are such a man, that's for sure!
I've never seen a picture of you,
From below the waist,
But I know you've got buns that won't quite.
And your eyes are an ocean of happiness,
Through which I swim on every look.
I love you Greasnin!

Please Greasy, be mine, for all of time. I will make you so happy!

After a stern talk with Lowtax and a lot of angry e-mails Frolixo was convinced to silence the cries of his passion. I don't know if I agree with stifling this budding romance, but it was making for a really fucking creepy work environment here at the office.

March of 2003 - Lowtax Breaks Down on the Frontpage

Best of 2003!Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka is the heart of Something Awful. He's been writing for the front page almost as long as I have, maybe even longer, and he considers himself the "boss" which is just another word for "cool". He can also be impossible to work with. He tends to go off on long rants about how much he hates this or that and if you don't immediately agree with him he redirects his rage towards you. After these rants he usually degenerates into complete madness, and in early March he happened to post one of these vitriolic pieces on the front page.

I have never hated anything in my life as much as I hate the entire cast of "Wings". I don't even know their fucking names but I wish suffering, failure, and death upon them all. I want to inject acid into the arteries of the guy who played Lowell and watch it eat through his skin. I will take a hatchet and cut off Antonio's hands and feet and then reverse their position so that he has to walk on his hands. Eventually I'll entire of his yowling and I will fire pistols into his chest and scream with joy. Helen, oh sweet and innocent Helen. I have collected and frozen my shit for weeks especially for her, and with this I will violate every sanctum and crevice her body can offer me. When they all are defiled I will make new openings. All of this while the two pilot brother faggots watch, slowly roasting and spinning on a spit, the fire barely more than embers to prolong their anguish.

The remainder of Rich's update was a phonetically spelled bebop routine he had been working on for no apparent reason. Naturally if anyone else had done something like that Lowtax would have gone apopleptic with rage and probably fired them, but see he started the site, so baby can be a big dick!

March of 2003 - Livestock Quits In a Tantrum

Livestock, champion of animated football GIF files everywhere and all around good guy, also happens to be more than a little unstable. After taking some slight ribbing from other writers at Something Awful he threw a massive tantrum a little over a week ago and quit.

Screw this! All I get is hate mail and I think one of the guys urinated in my coffee this morning. Who the hell keeps stealing my lunch?! It is plainly marked "LIVESTOCK ONLY" and yet every day it's gone and I find an empty sack and the remnants of my pudding cup on the counter in the break room. I am through with this shit. I wrote a letter to HR and they did nothing! I talked to Mr. Kyanka and again, nothing. Parsons, oh god, I think I even saw him wiping pudding off his mouth when I tried to talk to him about it. They don't like me, they're trying to force me out. Well guess what, they win! We'll see how those awful scumbags like getting by without me. ME! I'm ten times funnier than all of them put together and that stupid web site would die without me! I'm gone. The last chopper is leaving Saigon and I'm going to be on it.

After he had calmed down he tried to apologize and come back as a writer but Lowtax and, well, really all of us, were furious at him. That fucking asshole can go to hell, he will never write for Something Awful again. Except on Wednesdays, we can't find anyone to fill in for him. Oh, and Photoshop Phridays, because those are a pain in the ass to do and no one wants to take over the job. Other than that he can fucking hit the road!

That's it for this year, or at least until I get burned out and too lazy to actually write an update again. Thanks for strolling down memory lane with me!

Let's Get Ready to Purge

Hey, Taylor "Supposes" Bell here with the inside scoop on yet another failed attempt at entertainment software, the demo for a game called "Purge.". I was relaxing at home a few days ago, happily rocking out to Sonata Arctica, and Lowtax ICQed me to show me a game demo that would shift the course of my life forever.

The graphics in this game were horrendous enough to make my eyes turn around in their sockets and burrow backwards into my skull to escape the glow of the monitor. I’m afraid if I boot up Purge again my eyes will spontaneously detonate and sever my brain stem, which will at least give me a handy excuse when people question me about my complete lack of both writing ability and ability in general. The same ugly grass texture is repeated approximately 42 times per square inch in the demo map, but that’s okay because if the side of a hill happens to be facing away from a light source, every once in a while it will decide it really doesn’t need a texture anymore and will simply turn black. All human skin in the game looks like it’s made of carrot peels, and most of the gun models look like they were made by opening up Maya and copying and pasting random metallic shapes next to each other for half an hour. There is a massive amount of slowdown whenever the game needs to render complex shapes, such as “yellow lines” and “yellow lines that go in a slightly different direction from those other yellow lines.”

Check out the full review, otherwise I'll get upset and cry and then I'll have to blow my nose on your shirt.

– Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons (@sexyfacts4u)