There’s a puddle of water on your floor. How did it get there? Maybe you have a hole in your roof. Unfortunately, you lack a ladder.

Is there a way to check if there’s a hole in your roof without a ladder? Affirmative. Does the puddle only appear when it rains? Does your house get cold at night? You can’t gain “ground knowledge” (or “roof knowledge”, or whatever) but clues can be used to triangulate what’s going on.

The key thing is that “my house gets cold” is a weaker form of evidence that actually seeing the hole in your roof, so it’s a good idea to let a few clues pile up before making judgement. JREF is wrong. Sometimes a plethora of weak evidence CAN equal strong evidence.

I like to do this with internet users. I can’t look into anyone’s head and determine that they’re stupid or pathological. But there are distinctive and uniform “tells” that relate to certain types of people. I’m against making snap judgement based on just one trait, but let each additional one be a hair raised on your neck.

Pink hair: likely a woman who posts frequently on twitter about how she “needs feminism”. Like many women who “need feminism”, a cauldron of insanity, vindictiveness, and narcissism. Comments will be interpreted as death and rape threats.

Anime girl avatar: strong risk factor for trolling, being a sockpuppet, or being from /r9k/.

Self-describes as an “atheist”, “rationalist”, “free-thinker”: moderate risk factor for selective skepticism, hivemindedness, or being some social cause’s automaton (substantially more so than someone who self-describes as “religious”)

Self-describes as “traditional”: very opposed to moral degeneracy. Deletes internet browser history with the frequency and compulsion of Lady Macbeth washing her hands.

Self-describes as a good person: thoughtful and conscientious. Keeps the thermostat low enough so that neighbours don’t have to smell the decomposing hooker in the basement.

South Park Avatar: guy who’s been on the forum for 10 years, and whose every post is an impenetrable mare’s nest of inside references and in-jokes. Every reply after him being some variant of “hur hur hur, that’s exactly what you’d say, South Park Avatar Guy. Hey, everyone, check it out. South Park Avatar Guy just said the kind of thing South Park Avatar Guy says.”

Avatar of himself playing guitar: male who disregards life in favour of carefully staged pictures of himself having a life. Zoom in and the guitar will probably be strung back to front and held in the wrong hand.

PGP Key in profile description: you’re not meant to USE it. You’re meant to ADMIRE it. Woah, shit, this busta has a PGP key!

I hope this has helped you in your online adventures. More will be posted at the brisk schedule of “probably never”.

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.