One thing I’ve learned in my time here at VitalViper.com is that the name of my column makes a killer acronym. I also fell short of my “decade in review” article on New Years – I apologize for that I had a personal emergency and was unable to update. I’ll get around to writing it “eventually” since I now have plenty of time to do so without a deadline. It’s also incredibly, well, foreign for me to be writing for this website considering I feel so out of place and that nobody likely reads anything I write because I’m clearly far too well ahead in an educational and lexicon sense.

Regardless of the fact, I’ve written almost 20 articles for VitalViper.com since I joined at the site’s launch. This is actually my 19th submission but I’m not counting it because there’s no original content. Instead for you new visitors to the website this article is a recapping of the “best of” this column from the past year.

10 Years After Pokemon: The First Movie
In light of me not making an actual “decade in review” article on time I’ll start this list off with a close second. Written and posted not QUITE ten years to the actual release of Pokemon: The First Movie (the appropriate date would have been November 12, 2009) this article is largely a fond retelling of memories in my life that now must be remembered in the double digits in terms of how long ago it all happened. Back when, I guess, most of you were probably in diapers I was high tailing it as a Pokemon Master superstar where I lived. As expected this article wasn’t appreciated by this audience at all, but for the very few who lived it just like I did we all agreed that this is a great piece of work.

Stupifyingly Bad Album Covers
The most recent article inducted into this list, and also pretty low in the ranking overall (I’m going in order from “least worst” to “least least worst”) because of it. This article was put together with the help of another website and is a collection of, as the name implies, really bad album covers. We’ve got it all in here, folks. We’ve got your karate priests, we’ve got your emo ballads of dead friends, we’ve got your beaches, we’ve even got gay dogs. Yes you heard me: gay dogs. Boy, now I bet you just can’t wait to be all clicky with that link up there. :3

90’s Music Industry Rewards Laziness
In the 1990’s times were changing. Actually that phrase applies to any decade, in the case of the 00’s times were a’changing in the sense that people took leisure in crashing planes into towers and the economy decided now was as good of a time as ever to do a few backflips off of the diving board into a pool of red. We didn’t have to worry about those kinds of crises in the 90’s, all we really had to worry about was suspiciously dubious music and the bands that perpetuated it. The Amen Break may have been a drum loop that inspired a whole genre of music, but Ace of Base went 23x Platinum with the same bassline in all of their songs. This article demonstrates it.

Furries Are Weird. Furries Are Scary.
Long ago, six years ago actually, in 2004 I wrote a recollection of a then-recent bizarre encounter I had with a furry and his wonderful dinosaur artwork. The idea behind the article and the contents contained therein became somewhat of a stigma that followed me around and was one of the few in-jokes I really thought was funny; plus the story was always loads of fun to tell. With a marginally less (and also more recent) awkward social encounter I decided to retell the story once again and in this article I also included a revamped version of the 2004 original. This article isn’t as polished as the rest, but I was told the provided pictures is what made this article memorable.

Afterlife TV (Revisited)
Based on an article originally billed as one of the best from the ill-fated demon RFSHQ website this reworking of an old classic takes a look at the popularity of “ghost hunting” shows on television. With the recent spike of new series on Syfy and Discovery Channel I take a look at the Syfy Channel series Ghost Hunters and detail exactly why the entire show is a load of crock. From inept hosts to failure to understand even the basic principles of temperature this show has it all, and yet for some reason it has a giant fanbase. People are stupid.

DragonPlay: Vaporware Lifetime Achievement Award
What do Duke Nukem Forever and DragonPlay both have in common? They’re both games that were immensely hyped and ultimately never released – but we got plenty of promotional media about them, as is the case with “vaporware”. DragonPlay wasn’t a big-budget game being developed by a behemoth producer, it was actually just a garage game being developed by about three people without any sense of direction whatsoever and whenever someone came around to help them in a way that wasn’t “lol ill beta test ur gaem” they were kicked out. The person in question was me of course, here’s my story about this wonderful boondoggle of everyone’s time – DragonPlay.

Lockerz: What Website? (a.k.a. Most Disorganized Website of 2009: Lockerz) – Best of 2009
Lockerz is a website that was introduced to me by a friend of mine at TrackMill. Supposedly it’s one of those “earn points for free crap” rip-off schemes except instead of targeting non-Internet savvy soccer moms the Lockerz company went straight into the bowels of pop culture and targeted the trendy “scene” kids with a website offering a bunch of stupid fashionista clothing, “hip” accessories, and games for various consoles. I detailed my misadventures with their prize redemption and explained my gripes with their service and the terrible website design and content on their part. This article became semi-popular among communities where Lockerz point farming was popular.