So Bad It's Horrible/Other Media

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This is the place for horrible stuff that doesn't have a category of its own.

Important Notes:

1. Merely being offensive in its subject matter is not enough to justify a work as So Bad It's Horrible. Hard as it is to imagine at times, there is a market for all types of deviancy (no matter how small a niche it is). It has to fail to appeal even to that niche to qualify as this.
2. It isn't horrible stuff just because some Caustic Critic reviewed it. There needs to be independent evidence, such as actual critics (emphasis on plural) for example, to list it. (Though once it is listed, they can provide the detailed review.)
3. This page is about media. People and places are not media.

Examples (more-or-less in alphabetical order):

Conventions

• DashCon, a 2014 Tumblr-themed convention that from the moment it opened quickly become the standard for horribly mismanaged public events. Disastrously organized by complete newbies, the event was marred by such things as: artists being unpaid and consequently cancelling their presentations; the organizers neglecting to inform the attendees about cancelled events until the last moment (most notoriously pulled with the very announced panel with the cast of Welcome to Night Vale and with a concert by Steam Powered Giraffe that Dashcon kept promoting despite the fact that the band didn't even have such a presentation listed in their official site); offering the angry con-goers "an extra hour at the ball pit" (actually a half inflated kid-sized ball pit languishing alone in the empty convention room, an image that became synonymous with the event) as compensation for the cancelled events; invitees having to moderate their own panels; having an impromptu donation drive to get $17,000 to cover the hotel costs on the very first night (thus creating suspicions of fraud); complete disrespect towards the vendors; an incredibly low attendance (they expected at least 3,000, but instead received 1,500 at most, a high percentage of them underage); and security so low, a /pol/ citizen managed to infiltrate the event and film it with impunity.
  • The disaster got instantly memetic, with the infamous ball pit at the center of the jokes. Apparently someone actually peed in the pit, and rumors went wild about how people contracted infections of a venereal nature from playing on it.
  • When the only invitees who defended your event were the one that actually got paid on full and the panelist that was accustomed to pay for his expenses, you know you did it wrong.
  • There is even a theory on how Dashcon marked the beginning of the end of the SuperWhoLock megafandom. Granted, all these series suffered long hiatuses and/or severe Seasonal Rot at the time, but since the event bent heavily towards their joint fandom, the failure of the con was the turning point where people either became distant from the fandom or stopped claiming public affiliation to it.
• Before Dashcon, there was Tentmoot, an infamous 2003 The Lord of the Rings convention that was cancelled the same day it was supposed to begin (even having some guests stranded), due to both low sales and the spectacular mismanagement and outright conning of its organizer, an individual known at the time as Jordan Wood - later revealed to be a person nowadays known as Andrew Blake (back then being a female-identified person), that has been in the LOTR fandom under several other aliases and had stirred drama with each one of those. The whole thing generated an actual legal investigation for fraud, a tell-all book by one of then persons involved in the clusterfuck, and rivers of digital ink. To make a long story short: Mr. Blake essentially lied, conned, and manipulated people into (badly) organizing several events, with the convention as the expected gem of the crown, because he allegedly wanted to get enough funds to move with his girlfriend and transition into a male identity (he eventually did transition, but not before getting several criminal charges on him and having to move out of the area to avoid getting more). And the antics of this individual didn't end there; you may know him as the author of the infamous Harry Potter fanfic Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness.
• While Furry Conventions tend to have a bad reputation, the very popular RainFurrest was doing quite well... until the 2015 edition, where the massive misconduct of the assistants went beyond the organizers capacity of control them. Apparently, way too many assistants engaged in drug abuse, unsavory sexual conduct and wore openly fetishistic gear despite the convention taking place in a family-oriented hotel. There is at least one documented case of assistants claiming "RainFurrest is a fetish con" to everybody in range. But the final straw was when one assistant dismantled their room's smoke detector, with, along with plumbers having found found too many "used objects" flushed down and the hotel's hot tub having to be closed due to misuse by the assistants, caused the hotel to finally lose patience with the organizers and declared the whole convention being booted and blacklisted practically the minute it finished. The whole infamy of the 2015 edition basically spelled the end of RainFurrest.
• TanaCon, a 2018 convention whose whole reason to exist was that its creator, YouTuber Tana Mongeau, took offense on that she wasn't chosen as a featured creator at VidCon 2018 and decided to Start Her Own. Planned with just only one month on advance, and it showed. Between overbooking the place (leading to long waiting lines), lack of amenities and water, a very lackluster VIP bag of goodies, many panelists not appearing due to safety concerns, and the whole convention being canceled six hours in, saying that the whole thing was a gigantic fiasco is an understatement.

Foodstuff

• The Sugar Free Gummy Bears produced by Haribo. Apparently, their formula contained a disproportionately high amount of maltitol, a low-calorie sugar substitute that can't be properly digested by the human body and tend to cause flatulence and diarrhea on their road out of the digestive system (Potty Failure being a non-infrequent consequence). The best you can say about these sweets is that they are very good colon cleansers. It also led to several hilarious Amazon reviews.
• Olestra, a fake-fat touted to be an oil substitute for foodstuff. In practice, it deprived the organism of whatever nutrients food containing it may have had, caused abdominal cramping and flatulence, and have a tendency to getting out of the body fast and swiftly. It was quickly discontinued on most countries, even if the FDA keeps on its approved food additives lists. Time Magazine included it among the worst 50 inventions ever. It eventually got secondary uses... as firearms lubricant, and as a treatment for certain types of poisoning, especially those involving otherwise long-lasting toxins.

Technology

• Microsoft BOB was a laughable excuse for a "beginner" operating system. The concept was that the system was a "house", divided into several cartoony "rooms", where to open a program you should have to press the corresponding appliance. It had a user/password system, but if you failed three attempts the system gave access to you anyway. The problems with this approach to security should be obvious. It was disliked by users who understandably didn't want to be babied, and it was quickly killed by Windows 95, which proved to be more usable and less childish. Still, its legacy lives on in Clippy the Office Assistant and the controversial font Comic Sans, both of them originally created for this abomination.
• Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition, arguably the worst product ever released by Microsoft (and given the amount of crap they have released, that's not an easy feat). It was a bug-ridden mess that was notoriously insecure, unstable, and incompatible with a good amount of software and hardware, and leaked memory like the Niagara Falls leak water. It was planned as a "transitional system" between the 9X line and the NT line, but it was so awfully programmed it did not do what transitional systems are intended to do, read call the appropriate type of libraries to make programs run smoothly (ironically, Windows 98, the operative system it was replacing, was actually better at it). No wonder they ended up pushing the release of Windows XP (based on the more stable NT) less than 1 year after ME's release - even at its buggiest XP was more reliable than Millennium.
• Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) is a “crypto-art” fad that first gained popularity in early 2021. The idea was that you paid cryptocurrency for a single copy of an online image. While it seemed cool in theory, there were several glaring problems with this technology in practice:
  • On most NFT sharing sites, you could easily use the “save image” function in any web browser to get the image for free, and in case they disabled that using Javascript, you could use your OS’s screenshot program (like Windows 10’s Snipping Tool and Mac OS’s Grab) to the same effect.
  • You didn’t actually own the image or its usage rights. You just owned a hyperlink to the image, so once the domain expired, anyone could buy the domain and redirect it to whatever they wanted, including Rickrolls and shock sites.
  • It used Ethereum, one of the worst cryptocurrencies for the environment. Ethereum mining produces more CO2 than the country of Ireland. This ignited much criticism on Twitter, with certain users making blocklists of anyone who had even mentioned NFTs in a positive light.
  • Not to mention that the majority of NFT “art” could be considered Horrible itself, and that’s not even getting into problems with art theft, including Twitter bots like “Tokenized Tweets” that existed solely to allow people’s art to be stolen and made into an NFT. This in turn forced artists who were against NFT to actually get into NFT themselves, if only to stop the plagiarism of their artwork.
  • While the first wave of the NFT market quickly crashed within weeks, several game and entertainment companies have jumped into the NFT fad since, having promised releases of exclusive material like digital postcards and decorative DLCs with this method, inadvertently keeping the market alive due to speculation on what the companies will release. Only time will say if the thing will evolve and catch on, or if it will crash again and just leave a Horrible legacy.

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