#horrible xmas ever is shadowed by the fact its the last episode

[priestofberath]

I rewatched every episode of Invader Zim in order again. I don't know what to do now. I think I might rewatch every episode of Invader Zim in order again. I hate Career Day and Lice and Rise of the Zitboy. Nasty fucking episodes, those.

[secret-diary-of-an-fa]

Secret-Diary’s Annual Awards Show, 2018

Here we are. Xmas is over for another year and the last dregs of 2018 are circling the plug-hole of time like inedible week-old gravy. Soon, the drain-unblocker that is New Year will be emptied on top of it, disposing of it forever… and nobody will be very sorry. It’s always possible that, in the last four days of the year, something incredible will happen. Maybe Will Self will invent time travel and go back to the early 1600s to become Shakespeare. Maybe Theresa May’s face will swing outward like a poorly-secured cupboard door and reveal an electric aquarium where a panel of Sea Monkeys control all her movements and decisions. Barring both of those two events, however, I think its safe to say that 2018 was a complete write-off.

Mainly, this year has felt like an unnecessary and unwanted continuation of 2017. 2017: Part Two, if you like. Brexit continued to drag on like a wounded moose looking for a place to die. The idiotic decision to cast Whittaker as Doctor Who, made in 2017, was enacted here in 2018, causing waves of uncontainable ennui to sweep a nation. The Space Elevator still remains resolutely unbuilt and Elon Musk (mankind’s Token Sensible Person) doesn’t seem overly inclined to do anything about that just yet. In short, we’re standing at the far edge of a year that has been, by and large, a complete and total waste of everyone’s time… especially mine. I’d normally leave my End Of Year Awards for New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day, but fuck it. Almost everything else this year has been  vaguely disappointing, so let’s stick to the theme. We’ll ejaculate these awards out early and get it over with. You all know how this works by now: I make up some tenuously-related categories and proclaim a cultural event or piece of media the winner according to the dictates of my own diseased logic and the voices in my head. Let’s just crack on.

THE AWARD FOR BEST DVD OR BLU-RAY RELEASE Normally, I try to make the category names funny, but the best DVD/Blu-Ray released in 2018 was the remastered Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Boxset. Somebody cleaned up a six-episode sci-fi show from the 1980s and stuck a bunch of special features on it and it was instantly better than anything actually produced in the present day. That’s funny enough in itself, assuming you find cultural atrophy funny.

THE INSTANTLY-REGRETTED WANK AWARD FOR BEST MOVIE STARRING A SEXY FISH MAN … Goes to The Shape of Water, which may actually have come out last year. I also really enjoyed Aquaman, too, but I can’t pretend it was a superior piece of film-making. You know what, though? The fact that there are two movies about sexy fish men having non-conformist adventures says something important. It says “OUR CG ANIMATORS HAVE FINALLY FIGURED OUT HOW TO DO WATER, SO LET THE GOOD TIMES FUCKING ROLL!”

THE BERNIE MADOFF AWARD FOR MOST SUSPICIOUS DISCREPANCY … Goes to Doctor Who’s score on Rotten Tomatoes. Yeah, you knew you weren’t getting through this drivel without having to listen to my opinions on Doctor Who again, so let’s just get it out the way early. Critics gave the most recent series of Whittaker-flavoured Who a 94% rating. Fans gave it 31%. So people who can’t risk saying something culturally unacceptable because they could be fired loved it, while people who cared enough to review it unpaid and had no consequences to fear fucking loathed it. Let’s try not to blame Whittaker, for this though. It’s actually Chibnall’s fault, with his determination to minimise the sci-fi elements in the world’s most beloved sci-fi show. And the BBC’s fault for hiring Chibnall. And all our faults for not dragging every single BBC exec into the streets and whipping them to death years ago. Jodie Whittaker casting was a point-scoring ploy on behalf of a cynical organisation desperately trying and failing to be progressive, but never forget that it’s just the tip of an iceberg made of frozen penguin shit.

THE SPECIAL AWARD FOR RUINING AN ENTIRE NATION … Goes to Donald Trump, who is a fucking arsehole of truly unprecedented proportions. At the time of writing, he’s currently throwing a massive temper tantrum and has shut down entire branches of government just because the real politicians won’t give him the money he needs to build his preposterous, unworkable and illegal border-wall. Thanks to this one pathetic tool’s incalculably large ego, America is currently in a state of abject chaos.

THE AWARD FOR MOST NEEDLESSLY HARROWING TV SHOW Did you see The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix? If not, congratulations: you might need slightly fewer anti-depressants than people who did. A spooky romp through the lives of people who used to live in a haunted house turns into an uninterrupted misery binge when it starts digging into their feelings. One of them is a drug addict, one of them is depressed in a dangerous and unstable way, one of them has issues with intimacy, one of them is a writer reliving his own miserable past for a living and one of them is a straight-up, 24 carat arsehole. Oh, and they all sort-of hate their beleaguered father for not saving their mother (who was mad as a tin of pigeons) from Death By Ghost. Thanks, Netflix. 2018 wasn’t a deep enough well of despair already.

THE AWARD FOR MOST UNDERAPPRECIATED HUMAN BEING … Goes to Jeremy Corbyn, who spent his Xmas dispensing broth and socialist good-vibes in a soup-kitchen. He’s constantly attacked and ridiculed in the media… possibly because the British media isn’t used to dealing with high-ranking politicians who aren’t psychopaths. Also, he once accidentally high-fived Dianne Abbott's tit, thereby gifting the world the most entertaining five seconds of television in history.

THE NAKED BRIAN COX AWARD FOR MOST BEAUTIFUL THING EVER … Goes to Sapphire and Steel, a TV from the 70s that I recently rediscovered. Trying to explain it in normal English will undoubtedly make me sound like a man whose brain is slowly eating itself, because it defies all ordinary conceptions. Nevertheless, I’ll try. It’s about two elements from the period table who are also people from a higher dimension who handle anomalies in space-time using methods that make perfect sense but aren’t necessarily clear to the audience. This prevents entities that often manifest as patches of light or shadow from breaking into time from outside and stealing people or feeding off the resentment of the dead. Make sense? Well, it will when you watch it, and you absolutely should watch it.

THE NAKED STEVE BUSCEMI AWARD FOR MOST EYE-GOUGINGLY HORRIBLE THING EVER This is actually a tie between that time Theresa May attempted to dance and… pretty much the entire year itself. If 2017 was like watching a man fall off a cliff, 2018 has been like watching him hit every outcropping of rock as he plunged downwards towards a merciless ocean.

THE AWARD FOR MOST SLATHERING BETRAYAL OF A FAN-BASE … Goes to Fallout 76, which, by all accounts, turned the bleak, lonely world of Fallout into a perfunctory MMO with all the beloved series’ characteristic and recognisable features sucked out or watered down. A great game series screwed over in the name of chasing casual gamers. Oh, when will the industry learn. Never. The answer is never.

THE SHATNER AWARD MOST DRAMATIC OVERREACTION TO AN UNDERWHELMING SITUATION … Goes to the UK tabloid ‘news’ papers, who went into swivel-eyed paroxysms of outrage and confusion when a handful of drones brought air traffic to a halt at Gatwick Airport almost a week before Xmas. They squealed angrily about how ‘possible terrorism’ and how Xmas had been ruined for thousands of people (despite the fact that they were perfectly entitled to just get on other flights a day or two later). It later turned out that there hadn’t necessarily been any drones, and that air traffic had been brought to a standstill because the police got confused and mistakenly thought that there were.

And that’s more or less it. Lots of other things happened in 2018, but I never made any concerted effort to remember them, beyond noting that they were all pretty bloody stupid. Roll on 2019. I have no reason to believe it will be any better than 2018, globally speaking, but maybe I’ll finally buy a copy of Red Dead Redemption 2 and stop caring.