Jimmy from Montana writes:
Dear Lord Kristopf,
How do you decide what articles are awesome or not?Well Jimmy, it may shock you to learn that there's a handful of people out there who feel that the entire concept of awesomeness may be a bit ephemeral and highly subjective, if not completely arbitrary. Those people are what we call wikiterrorists.
Love,
-Jimmy
What most people don’t realize is that there really is an actual “awesomeness scale”. It bares many similarities to the scale used in judging the masculine endeavor of figure skating. Essentially an article comes out, performs its short program, and the 12 international judges give individual scores. After some technical finagling, dropping the highest and lowest score, and assuming the French judge doesn’t F it up for everyone, the process should give an accurate awesomeness figure down to the 3rd decimal.
An example of the standard awesomeness scale.
So, you see Jimmy, as a connoisseur of fine articles, as I’m sure most readers are as well, you begin to acquire a refined taste for their singularly boring topics and bad writing. Articles are very akin food, and thus, we must channel the despondent, hopelessly single, over-weight woman in all of us. For it is she who uses food, not just to escape the soul-crushing loneliness of life, but as entertainment. With that goal in mind, we first need to avoid the healthy articles that taste as assy as vegetables, like Inhibitory postsynaptic potential, and over-indulge on the delectable junk food ones, like the lovable Popobawa.
Let’s take geographical location articles for example. 99% of articles are, on a reader interest level, the equivalent of a bland chicken wrap. They consists mostly of features that sound like stereotypical apartment complexes, such as The Meadows, Blue Lake, and Hidden Valley Ranch.
Even so, this isn’t to say that taking a bold excursion out into flavor country will immediately find you an awesome article either. Too much sweetness for example and you end up with candy cane forest, gumdrop mountain, and every other candylandesque location you can imagine. Go overboard on the savory and you’d get places that are just too meaty to cram down your throat, like Death Valley, the Abyssal plain, and Brokeback Mountain. Too much salty and you end up with fictional locales like Empire of Ergoth, Crystalmist Mountains, to The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. Far too nerdy to taste very good.
Wait...I think. Maybe I should actually read the article before I declare that...
Anyway, it’s real a waterfall spewing out some sort of blood-red sludge. Oh, and I know what you’re thinking. No, it’s not industrial run-off. For once, this strange abomination isn’t human related (you know we humans would do it ten-times better anyway). It’s located in the wintry depths of Antarctica, and, as scientists speculate, of demonic origin. This is probably because it has things living inside it.
So go read the article and get your afternoon snack on or something. Just don’t blame me when your blood sugar crashes afterward and you're too tired to start working again. :\
