I was walking through the mountain of fucking snow that the Snow Demons saw fit to dump on Korea the other day when I slipped on some ice and busted my ass. Limping home with a bruised tailbone, I thought bitterly about how much I hated winter and snow and ice. Snow is a fucking stupid creation, but then I realized that there were many other things in the world that I have an irrational hatred for.

1.) Snow.

Yes, I just mentioned that I hate snow, but I have yet to explain my reasoning. So shut up and sit down.

Snow is a fucking terrible thing. You run to the window when you wake up, and there’s some sort of inner child within you that screams, “yay! Snow!” when you see the world blanketed in what you assume to be a soft and compassioning layer. But then the snow stops and you have to try to do such simple things like walk to work or drive a car, and you realize that snow sucks.
Because underneath that layer of snow is a layer of ice, possibly up to an inch thick, and when the snow finally melts off you have these giant clear layers of snot covering the world. When I went home to the US, my truck got hit with snow and nobody cleared the windshield for me, so coming home in the middle of the fucking night I found a layer of encrusted ice down the center of my truck’s front window. It looked like Frosty the Snowman had a case of the beer shits and used my windshield as his dumping grounds.

And then to top it all off I was walking to the medical clinic today to pick up some paperwork, and I was thinking about how awesome I was (as usual.) I had on all my winter gear and my thick-ass boots and I was trekking across some snow like some sort of poor man’s Captain Kirk. I seriously looked like the Ross Expedition, just with a hundred percent less dying. And then some Korean lady passed me while walking in high heels.

So fuck winter, I’m not playing anymore.

2.) Precious Moments.

You probably remember what “Precious Moments” figurines are. You know, those Downs-Syndrome albino Caucasian babies that immortalize precious moments such as “first kiss” or “first day of school” or “first abortion?”

Yeah.

http://www.preciousmoments.com/content.cfm/figurines?pType=figurines&pindex=2

Here’s a link to one of their overtly-saccharine website of overly-priced porcelain dollies that don’t move and don’t represent minority groups, because apparently Chinese or Egyptian people are incapable of having precious moments or even happiness.

What I hate most about Precious Moments is the complete white-washing (hah!) of issues and life in general. I imagine that the type of people who buy these things live in trailer parks and watch Oprah and bought Sarah Palin’s book and don’t like thinking about war or homelessness because that’s “icky” and also have two cats named Garfield and Mr. Paws. Also they don’t know why their husband left them.

So, fuck you, Precious Moments! You fill me with so much impotent hate!

3.) Web comics.

There was a time many years ago when somebody had the bright idea to combine pictures and words together to make a comic strip. Of course, the idea promptly brought the wrath of the local government because who would dare combine two things like that? That’s like mixing butter and toast!

This was the political cartoon. Inflammatory, controversial, and unique, the idea promptly was jumped on by a bunch of impotent fucks without any sense of humor and we got the modern Sunday funnies page in which the punch line of every joke is, “Garfield eats things,” “Hagar is fat,” and “Beetle avoids work.”

Of course, people got tired of hearing the same jokes over and over, and those that didn’t simply looked at the bright colors and occasionally clapped their hands.

So thus was born the web comic. A good idea in some aspects, it allows people to be controversial and to reach an audience that the Sunday funnies wouldn’t reach.
Of course, this meant that every retard with photoshop and a focus audience could try their hand at it. This means that new webcomics devolve into this bizarre sense of humor which essentially is “TITS FUCK LOL ABORTION” while the older webcomics, having achieved their target demographic, devolve into the depraved mundanity of the newspaper strips.

After all, we all have an idea of what’s going to happen in Shortpacked! today. Somebody will make a gay Batman joke, and somewhere, a retard will laugh.

4.) Laundry detergent commercials

Oh, you know you hate them too. There you are, watching your favorite TV show or at least trying to bide away your sad existence by watching daytime talk television, when Jerry Springer points to the camera and says, “and we’ll be back with our transvestite MILF Klan members after this.” Then the screen fades to black and you’re staring at a thin middle-aged white woman wearing khakis standing in her kitchen and says something like, “I have three kids and a messy husband, and I need something that will attack caked-on pasta sauce!”

And then Mister Clean shows up and they start to dance and the husband comes home and starts running his hand all over the dishes and he’s like, “wow, these dishes are clean!”

NOT ANYMORE NUMB-NUTS THEY HAVE YOUR OILY FINGERTIPS ALL OVER THEM.

Just . . . what the fuck. I don’t do this. Nobody does this. I just go to the store and buy some soap. That’s all I do. I don’t care who the fuck is on the front of my cleaning agent, if it’s a gay man wearing white or a little anthromorphic bubble scrubber or a dead cockroach, they all get the job done.

But I will admit that the one with the dead cockroach on the front has a funny aftertaste that makes my mouth burn.

5.) South Peak Games.

Oh, you’ve never heard of South Peak games? Don’t buy anything from them, ever, because they’re some sort of retarded bargain game developer that can’t program shit to save their lives. They’re the ones who have given us the travesties of Two Worlds, X-Blades, and Velvet Assassin, which if you like to link your Xbox to Biblical prophecy, fits in neatly with the idea of the Unholy Trinity.

I own both Two Worlds and X-Blades, more for the sake of humor than anything else. I have yet to play X-Blades. I gave up on Two-Worlds within five minutes of starting the game, as my ears were bombarded with the cauterwauling of some tone-deaf Polish woman during the character creation screen, and upon realization that my character was off to slay the “Taint.”

Yeah.

At least Dragon Age has the decency to call it the Blight, and Demon’s Souls calls it the Mist. Two Worlds proudly squares you off against the Taint, the giant smelly Taint that is ruining the land.

6.) A Christmas Story.

What’s that, you say? You Like “A Christmas Story?” That puke-a-riffic trite story about the saccharine coming of age in the late 1930s when everything was moral and good and the world could be seen like a giant black-and-white newsreel?

Well, FUCK a Christmas Story! I hate this movie so fucking much. “Wee, wee, look at me, wasn’t I just CRAZY as a kid growing up in the 1940s when there was Hitler and shit? I’m just glad that my father’s the one who had to do the fighting and I got to sit at home and listen to the Lone Ranger and fill up Tootsie Rolls and eventually become a hippie because I have no appreciation for anything that anybody has ever done for me. STICK IT TO THE MAN now watch this shitty comedy and give me money.”

The main reason I hate this movie so much is that it inspired a line of knock-off films by pretentious Baby Boomers each trying to prove who had a bigger Camelot Cameltoe. Everybody who ever joined the Captain America Secret Patriot Society or listened to an Ovalteine ad is now trying to fight for the same pair of rose-colored goggles so they can provide a narrator-driven story about how great things used to be when our enemies could be identified simply as “Hitler, Musso, Tojo.”

I bet that they don’t have to put up with these shitty comedies in China, mostly because people were doing things like trying not get vivisected at Unit 731 at the time.

7.) Bridal Magazines.

You know you hate them too. They’re those giant magazines, phone-book thick and littered with pastel colors, that clog up the magazine rack when you’re trying to find a good man mag at the convenience store. And they’re spewed with captions like, “what are this fall’s colors?”

Hey, here’s a good guess: white.

Bah! With the advent of the internet you think that we could stop cutting down trees to fulfill some doe-eyed eighteen-year-old’s “fairy tale.” Get off it. You’re not going to be drawn to the wedding hall in a horse-drawn carriage and there aren’t going to be pixies farting on your hair. You’re going to be driven to the local buffet in your dad’s Honda Accord and your dress has a jizz stain on it that didn’t see when you rented it from the local boutique. Your prince charming works for Buddy’s Air Conditioner Repair and reeks of body odor and Red Man and is missing the tip of his index finger from an accident with a firecracker, which might be excused if it was a childhood incident but it happened the last Fourth of July when he was drunk on Jim Beam. Your ring is white gold and your ex-husband-to-be either got it from Wal-Mart or the pawn shop. Your maid of honor is horribly obese, unable to fit in her gown properly, wearing two-dollar rubber flip-flops and just sucked off the best man. And the ring bearer is the snaggle-toothed, cavity-ridden bastard child of your second cousin and an unknown Marine.

Also, you’re pregnant.

Congratulations! Have a Precious Moments figurine.

8.) People who get irrationally angry too easil . . . fuck you.

9.) Disney Princesses. Caveating off of the fairy tale wedding is this terrible, terrible merchandising creation. What’s the quickest way to create an entire population of lock-step consumer loyalists? By bombarding them with pink pictures from the day they’re conceived. Before you know it, instead of doing healthy things like playing Army or cops and robbers with their brothers, they’re having makeovers and playing tea party.

So instead of raising our daughters to be responsible and motivated young women who want to pursue careers or become aspiring caregivers, we instead create the unrealistic expectation that they are to be placed on pedestals and have all of their whims catered to by some fat old magic fairy or by a gay man in denial. While most will finally outgrow this phase, there will be a handful that hold onto this insipid fairy tale well into their adult years, and they eventually succumb to the belief that Disney is some sort of magical place where dreams come true instead of some soulless mega-corporation that cares nothing for the common man and sees nothing wrong with shoving teenagers into Baloo suits in the Florida summer and letting their legs humped by furries.

But that’s not all I hate about Disney Princesses. It’s also just a fucking stupid franchise. Take, for example, the following picture, taken from the Cinderella character’s Wikipedia page:



How can somebody be the leader of the Princesses? Isn’t a princess, by default, a leadership position? And on top of that, I seem to remember Cinderella just sitting on her duff for the majority of the movie, occasionally singing a song, and having her fucking mice or fairy godmother bailing her out when things got too tough.

What the fuck does Cinderella do? Does she throw magic? Does she have a magic wand? Can she float or throw vegetables or race go-carts like Princess Toadstool?

No. She tries on shoes.

Being the leader of the Disney Princesses is kind of like being the Captain of the Anime Club. It looks good on paper, but you’re probably going to defer to somebody else in a crisis.

10.) Cat shit. Seriously, cats would be fucking perfect animals if only they didn’t poop. But nothing pisses me off worse than going into the bathroom in the morning and stepping in cat poop with my bare feet because Nero decided to be an unconventional cat and shit outside the box.

11.) Social networking. Oh-ho, just because you could sign up for something for free you think you’re important now? You think that people give a shit about what you’re doing with your life? Here’s a hint: they don’t. They’re more worried about them and if they can add you as a friend to make their own virtual penis bigger. They don’t care about what you did with your day. They don’t care about what you had for lunch. They don’t care about what you think and what your opinions are because you have the mental capacity of a four-year-old and your capability to convey a coherent thought is even worse. Stop taking pictures of yourself in your bathroom; you’re not special and there’s a large population of people you’ve never even met having a good laugh at your expense. Welcome to bitter truth, no return trips accepted. There’s only a few things you can do now. One is to cry. The other is to erase your Facebook page and hope that not too many people saw it. Because those pictures of you in the bowling alley just weren’t that flattering or interesting.

12.) The band the All-American Rejects. A friend of mine who was stuck on a bus during his second deployment to Iraq and he had just broken his foot and this song came on the radio while he was taking a on-base bus in Baghdad. He doesn’t recall the lyrics exactly, but remembers they were something along the lines of “my life is so hard and it sucks so much.” He threw a fit on the bus and made the bus driver change the station.

I wasn’t quite sure what my friend’s point was until I played their song, “Swing, Swing” in LEGO Rock Band.

Actual lyrics:

Days swiftly come and go
I'm dreaming of her
She's seeing other guys
Emotions they stir
The sun is gone
The nights are long
And I am left while the tears fall
Did you think that I would cry
On the phone?
Do you know what it feels like
Being alone?

Maybe if you weren’t such a whiny-ass punk loser your girlfriend wouldn’t be seeing other guys. Serves him right and I hope he spends the rest of his nights lonely and scared and frightened and cold and he never, ever knows the comforting caress of a woman and that he dies cold and shivering in an alley with nothing to shelter him except for a cardboard box and a vomit-stained plaid shirt that he pulled out of a dumpster after playing catcher for his meth dealer when he defaulted on his payment. Fuck this guy.

Anyway, this is only the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more stupid things that piss me off. Like romance novels. And third-party iPod gear. And Sprint/Verison and my old electric company and Croc shoes and Wishbone salad dressing and Wishbone the fucking dog and just wishbones in general. But those will be rants for another time. Because the number 13 pisses me off more than anything else, and I’m at twelve now. Also, I’m bored. So bye.