By now you’ve heard about the Burger King/Jeep twitter hacks – some lowly DJ from Boston got bored and hacked the twitter accounts of Burger King and Jeep, shouted a bunch of bullshit on the pages, and then the internet exploded in response, as if hacking a twitter account and giving your friends shout outs is somehow on par with hacking a nuclear silo and wiping out Greenland. If there were a college for hackers, hacking a twitter account would be on the entrance exam, and if you can’t do it you have to take remedial hacking classes with all the other dummies. Corporate twitter accounts get hacked all the time; they don’t always get the same media coverage as the Burger King hack, but it they’ve happened and the results are always another example of a blown opportunity to do something interesting, kind of like my recent Quick Fix article about people who blew their one shot at glory.
In July 2011, someone hacked a Fox News twitter account. This had the potential to be awesome. Did the hacker go all Colbert and assume the character of a dimwitted uber-conservative pundit to skewer the Fox News bullshit machine? Nope. He sent out a series of “BREAKING NEWS” tweets regarding the assassination of President Obama. With a “prank” that large scale, by the time anyone has heard of it they’ve also already heard that it’s fake; therefore, the initial prank is canceled out and is rendered stupid within minutes.
Tech blog Gizmodo had their twitter account hacked in August 2012. As you would expect, the hacker was able to perfectly execute the first half of his hack –gaining access to the account– but failed miserably at the second part — doing something with it. With limitless possibilities to be funny and/or make some kind of point, the hacker called black people the N-word – a lot. Then, more shout outs to his friends.
Oh, you want another example of twitter hackers getting stage fright and just hurling slurs because they don’t know what else to do after they hacked an account? In early 2012, The Huffington Post’s twitter feed was hijacked and, of course, a rapid fire series of tweets were sent out, most of which were homophobic slurs, occasionally directed at someone named Wes. Even sadder, one of the final tweets read, “Sup bitches??? Hacked by: New York Post.” This means that the Burger King and Jeep hacks, where the hacker claimed each company had been taken over by its rival (McDonalds and Cadillac, respectively) were a rip off of the HuffPo hack. The hacker behind the Burger King and Jeep hacks was himself a hack.
Hacking is one of those things that we all know isn’t necessarily good, but when it’s done well we push our feelings about the act aside and applauded the work. There is such a thing as a well-executed twitter hack.
There was once a man who felt he had been unjustly screwed over by PayPal and had his account frozen. So, he took over PayPay’s Twitter feed, changed their profile picture to steaming pile of shit, and continuously tweeted a link to an anti-PayPal site that detailed their shady business practices. It was a silly hack, but it had a purpose.
After the Newtown shootings, the Westboro Baptist Church announced they would picket the victim’s funerals. A hacker named Cosmo The God then took over a prominent church member’s twitter account, changed the background picture to an image that read “Pray for Newtown”, and re-tweeted White House petitions to get the WBC recognized as a hate group. No slurs, ignorance or shout outs; it was a hack with a point.
A lot of hacks are for the sake of it. But if you hack a high profile account, you’d better have some clever ideas up your sleeve or all you’ll be doing is showing the world that you can guess the name of an account holder’s dog.
A couple weeks ago Cracked ran this article of mine about how the son from the show Homeland is a psycho. But that’s not the only version of that article. There exists a secret second version only a few people had a chance to read.
The version I originally pitched is the one that was eventually published on Cracked; the one you can read at the link above. A couple days after I pitched it, the Sandy Hook Elementary tragedy happened, and there was a consensus between me, Cracked editor Adam Brown, and Cracked Editor-in-Chief Jack O’Brien, that we should delay the article for a little bit because of the subject matter. We originally wanted the article go up just before the Homeland season finale.
In an effort to save the article from being about a subject people (myself most certainly included) were too depressed to think about in any way, Jack suggested I re-write the whole thing with a new angle centered around how TV writers have no idea how to write child characters.
I wrote it up, liked it a lot, and I submitted it. About a week later I got an IM from Adam. He tells me he finally started watching Homeland and that I’m absolutely right about how shitty that kid is. Neither he nor Jack had ever seen the show, so they didn’t understand the profound uselessness of that kid. So, Adam ran the original version of the article.
And now I present to you the second version. Read’em both and compare!
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Writers for TV dramas are all people who understand a character’s failing marriage better than they understand their own. If a character isn’t experiencing some profound level of adult-centric pain, sometimes it’s obvious they have no clue what to do with them. It’s apparent on a lot of dramas, but none moreso than on Homeland, which features one of the most poorly written kids on TV, Chris Brody, the son of the Marine-turned-terrorist Nick Brody.
As inept as he is, Carl from The Walking Dead has potential. He might do something interesting. Maybe he’ll do a backflip or something? Chris Brody’s thing is being so oblivious to all of the horrible shit his horrible family goes through (rampant infidelity, terrorism, dirty politics, murder, conspiracy, etc.) that he comes off as a delusional secret psycho who’s so good at repressing his emotions that he might one day transition into a different Showtime series.
Homeland’s writers have no idea how a 12-year old boy would react to troubling news, so they brush him aside. Sometimes by literally telling him to leave the room, or with Mike, the guy Chris’ mom is banging on the side. Here’s Mike running interference when mom and big sis need some privacy to talk about a homicide.
And here are the writers again throwing Mike at Chris like a towel over a vibrator when Grandma drops by. This time it’s when the Brody’s — who are all scared shitless — are placed in a lavish CIA safehouse.
The writers for The Walking Dead clearly had no idea what to do with Carl for a while, so they had him occasionally wander off so they didn’t have to make him do things. In Dexter, Dexter’s kids were an integral part of the show for years, until the writers realized they were getting in the way of all the ritual murdering; so they were shipped off to live with their grandparents. On Lost, Walt looked like he was going to be important, and then he was promptly kidnapped by smoke numbers and was rarely heard of again.
Writing children can be difficult, especially if most of your writing sessions involve talking about new ways the characters can fuck and murder this week. Writers often confuse innocence with stupidity, so they either write kids as oblivious or they over-compensate and make them borderline evil child geniuses.
There’s an incredible chance that some of Homeland’s writers have kids, just like the writers of The Walking Dead, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Dexter. Yet kids might as well be dogs the writers tie to a bike rack while the adults grab a latte, or worse, used as props to raise the stakes for the adults.
In the penultimate episode in Homeland’s second season, the Brody family reaches a boiling point. In one scene, all of their anxieties spill out and it’s impossible for any of them to escape from the truth anymore – they suck.
So Chris immediately storms away and starts playing video games.
You’ve probably turned to video games as a distraction from the harshness of life, but Chris’ version of it is so goddamn ridiculous you have to wonder if the writers gained their understanding of pre-teens by asking old people what they think of kids today.
If today’s TV drama writers made a show specifically about kids and how they deal with life, by the third episode we’d see all the kids evaporate into clouds and float away as an engine revved up in the background and the writers fled the scene.
I’ve got a new Quick Fix article up on Cracked! In this one, I impart on to you knowledge about the silly things that go on in Brazil when election season rolls around. Give it a read and share it. Please.
EDIT: I’ve updated the link. It should link you to the article now, instead of the Cracked main page.
My named graced the front page of Cracked this weekend not once, but twice. The first, titled 5 Horrific Injuries People Didn’t Realize They Had was originally pitched as a regular length article, but worked better in a shorter form. The second one, and my favorite of the two, Al-Qaida’s No. 2: The Easiest Kill in Terrorism, is more along the lines of what I got used to writing at Funny Crave and Holy Taco over the past few years.
Read them, you dick.
Clothes aren’t just utilitarian, they’re a statement. And if you’re a racist/sexist, there’s clothing out there for you that will help you express yourself, at least judging by the controversy that surrounded some articles of clothing released by big clothing companies.
Not too long ago, via Facebook, Adidas released an image of a new sneaker called the JS Roundhouse Mid, a purple and gold suede high-top that would be perfect if you were cast in a Slick Rick music video circa 1989. The color scheme isn’t what sparked a controversy that led to Adidas announcing the cancellation of the shoe…
…it was the golden shackles attached to the shoe that got people doing something no one ever thought would actually happen – call out a shoe for being racist.
Under normal circumstances, looking at a shoe with disgust and screaming “racist!” at it would net you more than a couple of strange stares from the subway commuters currently occupying the space you call home. But there’s a first time for everything…or is there?
Nope! Not too long ago, Emma Barnett, a tech reporter for The Telegraph, was cleaning up her apartment when she noticed the washing instructions on a pair of her boyfriend’s pants.
The label starts off with some basic washing instructions – machine wash, warm water, flip them inside out, which itself sounds like the maker of the pants giving up and conforming to our collective laziness to un-flip our pants; pretty standard fare for words on pants. But then, for no apparent reason, we’re given an “or” that’s followed by “Give it to your woman. It’s her job.”
Who is this tag for? If the assumption made by the pants were at all true, that it’s a woman’s job to wash the pants, who do they expect is going to read the label? The pants made it abundantly clear that all men are slovenly assholes and would never read the label. The argument can be made that the designer of the pants was trying to add a bit of guy-centric humor and whimsy to the world of pants. Sadly, pants aren’t a very good joke delivery system. No one turns to pants for a quick pick-me-up when they’re feeling down. “Oh, pants! You slay me with your comfortable inseam and biting critique on traditional gender roles!”, is a sentence no one has ever said.
And then, almost inevitably, we come to that wonderful cross-section where hipster meets douchebag with the numerous clothing controversies sparked by Urban Outfitters and Abercrombie & Fitch.
In 2002, Abercrombie & Fitch released a line of T-shirts featuring Asian caricatures. Asians steering Rickshaws, Asians running laundry mats, Asians operating dojos – basically every Asian stereotype on the books was turned in to a T-shirt so hilarious that Abercrombie & Fitch had to pull them from store shelves, presumably because Asian Americans were laughing so hard they could no longer function like normal humans.
As for Urban Outfitters, the question is who hasn’t felt offended by their clothing? Jews? Check. Native Americans? Check. Black people? Check. And while it may not be clothing, Urban Outfitters once royally pissed off the black community by selling a version of the board game Monopoly called “Ghettoply,” in which “playas” received game cards that contained jokes we’re sure would be a hit at The Klan’s weekly game nights, like “You got yo whole neighborhood addicted to crack. Collect $50.”
Adidas causing a stir with some shackles that look like a pre-schooler’s My First Slave toy playset isn’t anything new, and it won’t even be the last time a clothing company releases a product they think is funny or cool but is interpreted as dumb and offensive. But there is one thing that is becoming clearer as the controversies pile up – these companies employ a lot of out-of-touch white guys.
This article was originally pitched to Cracked.com as a Quick Fix, an article for their new section that features shorter, occasionally topical articles. This one didn’t make it out of the editorial process alive, so that means it ends up here. They can’t all be winners, folks. I’ve already had two Quick Fix articles published on Cracked. You can read about how Demolition Man is prophetic, or you can read about violent urinals that burn dicks.
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“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”— Charlie Chaplin, actor, director, and composer (1889-1977)
