When you publish about 35,000 stories over the course of a year, a few duds are bound to slip through. We admit it. Not every Gizmodo post was perfect this year.
We've collected a few of our more memorable failures to share with you once more. Re-read, and re-ridicule. And please, suggest any posts that you, as a reader, just found unforgettably awful. We know you won't let us down.
The rest of the internet knew this video of a man flying like a bird was fake. But Jesus defended it. Update after update. He just wanted to believe.
"I think this is a good post with a bad headline," Brian says. "It turned out, I was two weeks off. I still think I was RIGHT. But the headline was enough of an overreach to sink it."
"I just have no idea what I'm talking about in this post," Mario says. "I just wrote the words. I don't know what they mean."
"This was just wrong," Harry says. "It was pure negligence that led to the Bialetti's demise, and then I replaced it with literally the worst coffee maker I could have bought. In fairness, my new coffee-scorching DeLonghi cost $7. But Mat Honan's reaction was appropriate: 'Oh, Jesus, Harry...a DeLonghi?' Fortunately, it has since been replaced by a coffee maker that's even safe for idiots like me."
"So this was a screwup. Yes, I was aware of the security risks you're taking by using WEP security. But I did a shit job of explaining that to everyone else.
I mostly stand by the sentiment that having awful Wi-Fi on a gadget is probably worse, for most of us, than a papier-mache password, if you know the risks, and are secure with that. I didn't explain that fully enough, and then, worse, got defensive about it."
-Kyle Wagner
Michael Hession's confession: "I basically lambasted a company for putting an entirely new and unprecedented feature in their product. Stupid."
Not a bad piece of writing per se—in fact, the tips are all basically valid. But features editor Harry Sawyers nominates this post as one of the year's worst because simply reading it conjured indelible mental images of Sam doing unspeakable things to himself. "It was a really tough edit," Harry says.
Casey wrote a story on the internet talking about how shitty it is to try to write stories on the internet when the internet is acting up. He's a complicated man, Mr. Chan. The explanation: "It was right around the time I was leaving New York which made me a Kyle-Wagnerian grouch when shit wasnt working."
From Eric Limer: "Here's a TOTAL FUCKING DISASTER from me. *sigh*"
It is, at the very least, an impressive use of the strikethrough command.
"Not too proud of this post about a rifle with a flask in the butt," Andrew Liszewski says. "I jumped to the conclusion it was designed to hold alcohol, but according to commenters the flask would have been used for gunpowder. Duh..."
TMZ has drones? We all wanted it to be true. Sadly, it wasn't true. But before we found that out, Leslie had managed slip in a trademark Jason Bourne reference, along with a suggestion that the drones would be used to "catch celebs in action hopefully topless along the French Riviera."
Brent wrote this story in an extremely sleep-deprived state. Immersive reporting is admirable and all, but man, have you ever read something written by a half-dead hack the middle of the night? Gah.
There were, among the errors and typos, some truly inspired phrases, such as: "Old Man Sleep is throwing his 'mallets of tiredness' at you. Well, it's much harder to hit a moving target." That one, we decided to keep—just as long as Brent could paste a picture of Ed Asner's face onto Bowser's body from the original Super Mario Bros. In his worst post of the year, Brent delivered.
View the original article here
