But not in the sense that I’m sitting here Youtubing Naruto AMVs. I like badness that’s intricate and elaborate. Badness that invites you to sit and think about it.

This is the itch that things like the Onion and Tim and Eric scratch so well. They take the small things that are subtly wrong about TV and exaggerate it into a yawning chasm of wrongness. This: to wit. Saccharine blandness overlaying a creepy cultlike message. Lovey-dovey cosmic oneness ideals mashed together with crude “get rich now” pragmatism. These ingredients combine and form a cake made of unease and discomfort, and it’s hard to look away.

But that video is satire. The truth is, there’s a lack of authentic badness in today’s world.

Blandness, boredom, hypocrisy, incompetence, and evil we have in abundance. Genuine cringeworthy badness, not so much. James Rolf (proprietor of The Angry Video Game Nerd, a Youtube series that critiques videogames) has lamented this in the past: there just isn’t enough material for him. Most videogames can be described as “mediocre and unmemorable.” There’s only so many games like Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing…an alleged racing game where your opponent never even moves, and when you cross the finish line you get a “YOU’RE WINNER” message. Most bad games are forgotten as soon as you put them away. Big Rigs tends to stay with you.

It’s not that something’s shoddily made. It’s that your brain was primed with certain expectations, and the thing either failed to meet them, or met them in an unsettling and disturbing way.

And it’s very hard to “fake”. We respond to authenticity, even when watching atrocity porn. That’s the reason Tara Gilesbie’s My Immortal became so notorious, while the countless attempts at one-upping it have failed…because it looked real, while the ripoffs. No comment on whether My Immortal itself was a troll job. That’s not the point, only that it was close enough to the genuine article to fool people.

One thing’s for sure: if you can generate authentic bad things on spec, you have a talent, and you should be using it to become rich. Trains are boring. We see them every day. Usually we don’t even look at them when they pass. But when they crash…now you’ve got attention.

I’m a professional snoop. It pays the bills, especially Bill my bookie and Bill my parole officer (and Bill Watterson, from whom I stole this joke). Preliminary investigations indicate that there is confusion about what the word “neckbeard” means.

A classic neckbeard has three things: nerdy interests, obesity and/or poor hygiene, and arrant narcissism.

Possession of only two traits does not qualify one for neckbeard status. Harry Potter’s Dudley Dursley has a large physique and excellent self esteem, but he is not a nerd, and hence cannot be a neckbeard. Comparatively, Samwell Tarly from A Song of Ice and Fire is fat and introverted and sensitive in his tastes…but he lacks the neckbeard arrogance.

Neckbeards seem like a recent fixture of our culture (ignoring occasional historical artifacts like Ignacius J Reilly). Where do they come from? The internet’s an obvious guess. Some claim that the internet is great because it connects you with lots of people – dogs, FBI agents pretending to be 14 year old girls, etc – but don’t forget the other side of the coin, it also lets you filter out people.

Take the furry fandom, which is not so much a “fandom” as a neckbeard spawning ground. There’s a feeble public facade that it’s a wacky art movement by people who enjoy anthropomorphic animals – and ten billion square hectares of sexual perversion beyond it (occasionally someone breaks ranks, reveals the sordid side of the fandom to the tabloids, and recieves an Amish-level shunning, see Chew Fox).

The neckbeardiest element of the furry fandom are the “dragons” – hardcore therianthropes who believe that they are literally dragons imprisoned in human bodies. It’s often said that dragons are the “furries of furries”, noted for their arrogance, self-delusion, and incredible social awkwardness. Here’s dragon Kaijima Frostfang telling his life story. Note certified neckbeard quotes like After my “death” (the human concept of death is so simple, and limited ;)), I was highjacked by some of the local Powers (thanks Thok’sa :p) and steered into being dropped into human society (of which I was mostly underwhelmed… except for some of the food, the music, and Anime, which is very nice :))”, which gave my computer autism. Is there any doubt that Senor Frostfang possesses a majestic beard that spills over his keyboard like R’lyehan tentacles?

The furry fandom could never exist at its current size without the internet, and just as epicycles can exist within epicycles, the “dragons” could never exist without the furry fandom. There’s no way this sort of thing develops outside of a cult-like commune that has the ability to shun outsiders. The more time you spend in an environment where people tolerate your strangeness, the less strange it seems, and the more likely you are to bring that strangeness to Sharon Tate’s doorstep.

Is it possible for a woman to be a neckbeard (or an equivalent term, like “legbeard” or “tumblrina”?) I honestly don’t think so. Nerdy, obnoxious women exist, but there seems to be a different dynamic at work there. Neckbeards have an unerring belief in their own charm. Their female counterparts are usually cauldrons of self-loathing and over-compensation. And part of the neckbeard aesthetic is that you are completely repulsive to the opposite sex. “Legbeards” still seem to get lots of male interest.

And I’ll mention that the furry fandom has avoided that issue entirely, because most of them are gay. In the words of Eric Blumrich: “furries, by and large, are bi and large.”

Again, this is an interesting historical mystery without a clear answer. It’s said that influential early furs like Mark Merlino promoted the subculture heavily in the gay and S&M communities, but I suspect only a small part of the fandom’s current base would have joined through such evangelism (most furs now have never heard of Merlino). It’s possible that gay people are more open to exploring sexualities a bit off the beaten track (phrasing!). It’s also possible that whatever causes male homosexuality is also a risk factor for other types of sexual deviancy.

“We’ll choke their rivers with our dead” – Bart Simpson

“There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.” – Jean Baudrillard

“Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it’s also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.” – Jean Genet

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”

“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” – Frederik Pohl

“When you`re reading or skimming argumentative essays, especially by philosophers, here is a quick trick that may save you much time and effort, especially in this age of simple searching by computer: look for “surely” in the document, and check each occurrence. Not always, not even most of the time, but often the word “surely” is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument.” – Daniel Dennett

“Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal, a city where everybody could draw whatever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall – it’s wet.” – Banksy

“The point of philosophy is to start with something so obvious as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it” – Bertrand Russell

“It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody’s beard.” -Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

“Epping Forest was still untouched across the other side of the street, rabbits, squirrels and deer were always around. In the morning my mother would walk me to school. It took me about ten minutes through the forest along a trail worn by footsteps and deer. There were pools, frog ponds, deep shadows. It was a magickal place, and a favourite haunt, I learned later, for rapes, flashing, and the dumping of corpses.” – Genesis P-Orridge

“Drr…drr…dr…” – Junji Ito