Friday, December 09, 2005

Zero to One Hundred Percent Annoyance in Two Seconds

We like amusement park websites that don't provide any useful information. We like them even better when they're impossible to navigate and take eons to load. And we positively love them when they try so hard to be cool and "with it" that they vanish into a vortex of their own suckyness. That's why we simply adore the preview site for Superman Escape, a new ride premiering in (fill in the exact time you see on their countdown timer here) days at Warner Brothers Movie World in Australia.

Bear witness to the above-mentioned travesties throughout the site, but pay careful attention to:

-The Shout-Out feature. Yes, an actual website for an actual theme park offers for people to register and give mad props to their homies. As if it's not awful enough that rich white suburbanites are feebly co-opting street lingo every chance they get, now they get to try it out online, where they can't see people pointing and laughing at their lame, pasty asses. Bad idea. And the scrolling comments in the Shout Out bar, real or fake, are annoying enough to make you want to ram a fork in your own eyeball.

-A section of the site called, and we are not making the slightest bit of this up, "Stuff 4 U." AOL-speak sucks in its original form, it sucks in forums, it sucks on websites, and it especially sucks when people start using it in everyday life. It's started making its way into formal papers in schools, and now we have a theme park website thinking it's cute and that they can use it to attract young customers. Well, we can see what sort of audience Warner Brothers Movie World is courting: lobotomized howler monkeys. Don't be one. Don't visit until this park's management learns how to speak and write properly in its native language. The time has come to stand against the insidious destruction of the English language.

-The Ride Cam section. Doesn't "Ride Cam" seem to imply a webcam or photo album or something? Well, there appear to be two pictures and a video that features a really awful interview with someone in park management. The evidence appears to be in stark contrast to the park's claims that the section is "packed with photos of the ride." Incidentally, "there's even interviews with the rocket scientists who put this puppy together" is an offensive sentence for two reasons. One, "there's" means "there is," and that means they are using a singular to describe "interviews," which is plural. In other words, they have again butchered the English language. Secondly, do we even have to describe why a professionally-designed website using the phrase "put this puppy together" is such a crime against nature? Die!

-The annoying interview with a winner from some contest. Maybe it's a real interview with a real idiot. Maybe it's made up by an idiot. All we know for sure is that at least one idiot was involved, probably several.

The Superman Escape preview is believed by many religious experts to be the fourth sign of the Apocalypse. While this is being ascertained for sure, we'll just go ahead and make it our Site O' the Weak.

--JCK

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