Monday, November 9th, 2009...12:01 pm
The 10 Biggest Disappointments of the Decade
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By Rassam Fakour-Zaker
Know Your Money Editor
There have been some amazing, life-affirming occurrences over the past ten years. But you don’t want to hear about those, do you?
Thought not. Here’s the most crushing letdowns of the decade…
10. The Y2K Bug: Crappest techno-crisis ever (1st January 2000)
The disappointments started early this decade. For years there had been rumblings about an impending IT meltdown due to the widespread (and rather short-sighted) abbreviation of years into two digits.
As media scaremongers counted down to the apocalyptic ’00 switchover, the Millenium Bug hype ramped up considerably and, as I remember it, people began stockpiling tins of analogue food and steam-powered hair straighteners in a desperate bid to stave off the annihilation of civilisation.
Now, I’m no apocalypse-yearning Luddite, but I was looking forward to a little post-millennial excitement – maybe some light looting, or the eradication of global credit card data. Plus I had a massive stack of unread books to catch up on.
Alas, the year 2000 arrived and what did we get? Problems issuing bus tickets in Australia. Rubbish.
9. Firefly gets cancelled: What a gorram disappointment (December 2002)
Joss Whedon’s quietly awesome sci-fi series was doomed from the start when Fox TV’s executive idiots decided to air the initial episodes in the wrong order before unceremoniously cancelling it.
It wasn’t necessarily up there with the best shows of the decade, but many lesser products have inexplicably clogged up our TVs season after season, year after year (*cough* Lost, *cough* Prison Break).
But not poor old Firefly, which ran for less than one of its intended seven years. That’s nearly three quarters of a decade of Cap’n Reynolds and crew’s wisecracks, bar brawls and bank robberies we missed out on. Instead we got the useless Dollhouse.
8. Indiana Jones 4: Further proof that George Lucas hates humanity (22nd May 2008)
George Lucas, the bearded Dark Lord of Disappointment, spent his early career lovingly crafting wonderful escapist fantasies that defined our childhood years and captured the budding imagination of an entire generation.
During the 1990s, however, he completed his journey to the Dark Side by single-handedly engineering 20th century cinema’s most gut-wrenching disappointment: The Phantom Menace.
This decade, after further defecating over our collective childhoods with two more intergalactic kicks to the scrotum, he turned his Mephistophelian hand to overseeing the destruction of his other much-loved creation: Indiana Jones.
Nuclear blast-proof fridges, long-lost son clichés and alien conspiracies: this was not the rollicking, whip-cracking Indy of old, but a cynical, hackneyed, CGI-spattered sham. Why do you hate us so much George?
7. Windows Vista: Bill Gates validates Mac owners’ smug faces (30th January 2007)
The monolithic Microsoft Corporation has taken a lot of criticism over the years. All of which seemed fully justified after the release of their last operating system which managed to be even crapper than the previous one. Security flaws, hardware compatibility problems, draconian digital rights management – the list goes on and on (and it does, at length, on the Wikipedia page entitled “Criticisms of Windows Vista”).
However, the most disappointing thing about Windows Vista was that it justified the annoying self-satisfaction of Apple Mac owners, making them infinitely more irritating and punchable.
6. Duke Nukem Forever: Duke Nukem Never (2000-2009)
13 years. That’s how long we’ve been waiting for the triumphant return of the wise-cracking, decidedly non-PC video game action hero. After announcing Duke Nukem Forever way back in 1997, the developer, 3DRealms, subjected long-suffering fans to a hilariously protracted trickle of screenshots, rumours and bold proclamations of revolutionary content, with the odd teaser trailer thrown in to keep their increasingly tenuous hopes alive.
13 years? What the hell were they using to develop this game? The Antikythera mechanism ? Windows Vista?
Such ponderings – amusing though they are – were rendered irrelevant in May of this year when 3DRealms announced they were shutting down and that development on the eight-time winner of Wired.com’s annual vapourware awards had finally ceased.
Or maybe not? Rumour has it that DNF is still on the cards. Time to let it go people…
5. Large Hadron Collider gets switched on: Nothing happens (10th September 2008)
You can’t blame them for the hype, I suppose, for the LHC is nothing if not utterly esoteric. Therefore, in order to justify the staggering costs, and to let us simple folk in on the whole thing, they cranked up the media buzz generator.
The popular press excitably proclaimed that humanity was on the cusp of discovering the unifying theory of everything ever in the history of everything (ever), while doomsaying nutjobs predicted that we were about to be sucked into a black hole of our own making.
But dammit, the hype succeeded: it was an undeniably exciting time – absolutely baffling, yet pregnant with the wondrous possibilities of human endeavour. The LHC looked like a Bond villain’s lair for Christ’s sake. They had made particle physics sexy.
But then they switched it on. And there was no black hole, and no instantaneous scientific epiphanies, and our MTV-addled, instant-gratification-seeking brains just switched off.
And then it blew a fuse.
4. The Matrix sequels: The Wachoswkis disappear up their own rabbit holes (May/November 2003)
Thanks to the deluge of dire movie sequels, cinema historians will look back on the Noughties as “The Decade That Imagination Forgot”. But while most were pointless, cynical continuations of past-their-prime or previously-concluded franchises (see number 8), the Matrix sequels were of a much more disappointing nature.
The original movie ended the 90s in a hugely satisfying synthesis of existential angst, visual flair, innovative action and intellectual depth that seemed to herald an exciting cinematic future of the new millennium.
But instead of delivering on this promise, the Wachowskis blew it. Twice. The first movie’s inventive action was replaced with tired and overblown CGI exercises; the playful deconstruction of notions of reality gave way to annoyingly oblique cod-philosophy and heavy-handed religious mysticism; and what did we get in place of the original’s effortless cool? That ridiculous rave scene.
3. 2004 US presidential election: Rest of the world slaps forehead (November 2004)
OK, vote-tampering aside, in one way it almost made sense. I mean, the Democratic candidate… umm… hold on… John Kerry (I just Wikipedia’d it), was hardly a memorable candidate. But from every other logical (and illogical) standpoint it was brain-meltingly confounding. Bush? Again? WTF America?
There’s a saying where I come from: vote for a fool once, shame on… shame on you. Vote for a fool twice, umm… everyone… everyone will be really, really disappointed.
2. The financial crisis aftermath: Time for a change? Erm… no (2007 onwards)
When the financial crisis struck in the latter part of the decade, bombarded by grandstanding political bluster about economic reform, I found myself gripped by a fleeting moment of delusional optimism, during which I almost believed that our perfidious, vote-pandering leaders were actually capable of instigating tangible, positive change.
“Finally,” I thought, “the world has accepted that our global economy is a ridiculous sham, our benevolent leaders will surely rip it down and in its place we shall build a progressive, sustainable and just system and our planet will exist in peace and harmony for aeons”. Embarrassment and disappointment soon followed.
To use Homer Simpson’s neologism, the economic crash was a quintessential “crisitunity”. It provided a real opportunity for genuine change. We could have slapped the smug look from the bankers’ jowls and told them stick their damned derivatives and reckless greed.
But with our hands greased by impotent political rhetoric, public apathy and the hegemonic influence of the banking sector, the chance slipped through our fingers. Instead, we allowed the bankers to go about their greedy business, risking global economic security in the ceaseless pursuit of growth and profits. This time, however, with us footing the bill.
To quote Homer again: D’oh!
1. No contact with alien life forms: Seriously, this is getting boring (2000 onwards)
We know you’re out there you little green bastards. A simple “hello” would have sufficed. We’d spent the previous decade with Mulder and Scully pretty much proving your existence, stamping the notion of your imminent arrival onto our collective consciousness on a weekly basis. And you don’t even have the decency to turn up.
Here’s an idea for you: give up the covert cavity probing, grow some balls – or the extra-terrestrial anatomical equivalents – and stop disappointing everyone.
You better show up next year with a good excuse and some sweet gadgets or you’ll make Arthur C. Clarke look like a right dick. And that’s not cool.
Were your hopes and dreams brutally crushed in the last ten years? If so, let us know what your biggest disappointments of the decade were in the comments thread below.
44 Comments
November 10th, 2009 at 11:10 am
I agree with the author on many points, but it’s all down to personal views really. The Duke Nukem thing goes right over my head, and although excellent I’m not sure Firefly warrants a mention here.
The thing I most agree with is that Mac owners are c*nts.
November 10th, 2009 at 7:39 pm
I am a Mac owner and I can confirm that yes I am a smug c*nt.
November 10th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
The entire election in 2004 was a disappointment. I knew it was going to Bush when they picked his cousin to run against him.
I’m not really disappointed about Duke Nukem Forever. Publishers have been making unnecessary sequels and remakes to classic games for years now (Doom, Wolfenstein, etc.) and none of them compare to the originals. The fact that a steaming pile of poo named DNF hasn’t shown up allows me to remember Mr. Nukem fondly.
November 11th, 2009 at 12:03 am
“The Decade That Imagination Forgot” is an accurate description.
November 11th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
When will the Obama administration be added to the list.
November 12th, 2009 at 5:50 am
You only put the Matrix sequels on here because your inferior intellect doesn’t understand the meaning of the Matrix or even who Neo really was…
If the bankers (and banks) you mention failed, the entire Fed money system including FDIC insurance would have crashed. That would have wiped out everyone in the country and 80% of the capital in the world. The economy situation is not as simple as blaming the banks. It started with individual greed, added in some individuals and organizations willing to supply the drug of choice, bigger houses and never ending home equity lines of credit, then investors said, whoa, I gotta get me some of this shit, then reload it about 10 times from 1997 when Clinton ordered the banks to give credit to people who were not credit worthy, until mid-08 when people were still trying to get bigger houses and keep sucking up equity lines of credit like they were coke fiends in a Columbian drug cartel and what you have spit out in the end is 10+/- unemployment because the economy (via investors) reset itself to the 20 to 30% less value that brought it down to the ‘real’ economy floor.
It ain’t as simple as saying Bush did it.
And Mr. Obummer is doing a craptastic job so far, except of course his attempt to rape health care and screw us all out of 1.2Trillion and tell us it’s for our own good.
RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT. How did this numb nuts get voted in? That is the bigger question than why did Mr. Bush beat the Vietnam Liar Kerry.
Wake up and smell what you are shoveling.
November 12th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Seriously “The Obama Adminstration” has had the worst press of any administration ever… where were all the haters when Bush raped our economy with false wars and ludicrous government spending?
The health care reform may be outrageous but it could have been paid multiple times over by both our wars on “terror” and drugs.
And fuck if you knew anything about economics you would understand that the best way out of a recession or depression is spending on long-term structural improvements, ie new power grid, health care reform etc.
So stop sucking on Glenn Becks’ dick and get your own informed opinions you fucking dumbasses.
November 12th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Scott > Troy
November 12th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
I’m surprised no one has commented on #1. To that I say: Woot! Bring on the alien babes!
Of course, that actually might be the main reason that aliens haven’t stopped by to say ‘hello’. They want to keep the hot alien chicks to themselves.
November 13th, 2009 at 6:54 am
Heretic! Lost is and always has been amazing (except for the third season).
November 14th, 2009 at 11:04 pm
I’m SOOO with you on the Firefly thing
November 15th, 2009 at 7:11 am
I’m not sure about the alien thing…yes, it might be awesome, but I worry that they would be the equivalent of Christian missionaries, and for fuck’s sake we don’t need any more of that.
@ Troy: you got pwnt…I still can’t understand how you didn’t seem to get mad when we invaded a country illegally, let the market get deregulated to the point of complete collapse, and effectively had the Constitution effectively suspended on our own shores, but get mad when we try to get people health care…THAT is what sets you off?
As for the argument as a whole, I did not vote for Bush, nor McCain/Palin, but seriously, America’s elections are America’s problem, whether I agree with the sentiment or not.
November 15th, 2009 at 7:27 am
Segway.
November 16th, 2009 at 3:33 am
Sean>Everyone
Haha, I love 4th grade math!!
November 16th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
well, the UK has free health care, costs us a bomb but its awesome having it, we`ll never get rid of it.
November 16th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
to positronic:
are you serious? a bunch of people lost on an island and somehow they keep finding new guns? that show is so full of plot holes that all its, dare i say, credibility as poured out of it. modern gilligan’s island.
to troy:
clinton may have extended credit to less fortunate, but the banks took it one step further and put them into loans that they knew they would default on. Plus Bush put a similar policy in effect that would allow people with awful credit buy houses with no money down. I don’t know if you remember this, but Herbert Hoover passed a similar piece of legislation, called the Own your own home act, which greatly contributed to the 25% of Americans that defaulted on the their mortgages in the late twenties and early thirties. this, coupled with the massive deregulation of wall street (sound familiar) led to the great depression. Bush just didn’t understand our country’s history enough to learn from it.
Just to top off the whole “learning from our history” theme, how did we get out of the great depression? FDR’s initiation of a multitude of public works projects and government programs. One of them being the FDIC that you’re whining about along with social security and welfare (i.e. demon socialist public health care).
as for what obama has accomplished, here’s a story from what can only be your beloved Fox that states that Obama’s first 100 day was the most productive since FDR. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/04/21/adviser-obamas-days-productive-fdr/
and here’s two others in case those done suffice…
http://www.2theadvocate.com/opinion/63973707.html
http://www.2theadvocate.com/opinion/63973707.html
sadly none of these articles even show everything he has done to this point. but they’re enough to show that obama has done more in his first year (mind you its not over yet) than the vast majority of American presidents.
As the last article I posted states, you’ve been drinking to much of the “Fox News brew.”
November 17th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Good list, ive got some topic suggestions.
1. Why havent we built more nuclear powerplants? Toshiba has a mini nuclear reactor the size of a trailer (look it up and read about it). By now you would think these would be everywhere? Of course more research still needs to be done in the area of radioactive material disposal.
2. Where is all the research into battery technology for electric cars? The technology for the cars themselves is definitely taking shape… but the battery technology is lagging behind. Its 2009 and I still cant get an electric car that can be charged anywhere and in the same time it takes to fill a tank of gas. Its time to start standardizing this stuff.
November 17th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Ah, Duke Nukem
Those were the days
November 20th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
I think it is funny that Scott thinks Obama has bad press when every “journalist” in America loves him (some even getting tingles down their leg). The newspapers and left-leaning TV shows are terrified of bad-mouthing him for fear of being called racist for telling the truth, and his only criticism comes from the right, which you suggest we suck their dicks if we listen to them. On the other hand – EVERYTHING Bush did during his second term met with screeching criticism from all of the major networks; but back then it was patriotic to hate the president.
November 21st, 2009 at 12:27 pm
For those who say FDR’s public works programs got us out of the Depression, you have a sad and misguided understanding of history. It was WWII, from the US becoming the “Arsenal of Freedom” and selling weapons to the Allies to the eventual entry of the US into the war that brought the country out of the Depression. The New Deal was not the panacea that the modern left makes it out to be.
That said, Bush should not be defended by anybody, nor should his administration be defended. It was a disgrace to the conservative momvement in this country because it near completely abandoned political and economic conservative tenets in favor of extreme social conservative viewpoints.
November 21st, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Ah Troy! Justifying your naming relationship with the Greek city. In being completely gulible, ultimately leading to your downfall!
Silly Troy (both person and city)!
November 23rd, 2009 at 8:24 am
Dear Russel,
Please open your eyes and realize that this president is getting much worse press, including people showing up armed to presidential events. You might also want to take note of the behavior of entities like Fox News, who gave former president Bush a pass when he was having his way with the Constitution, but promptly decided that everything that Obama does is anti-American, socialist, fascist, and totalitarian, all at the same time. Unless, of course, he is respecting the leaders of other countries, in which case he is a pussy.
Sincerely,
Someone who actually pays attention.
November 23rd, 2009 at 9:47 pm
I’m a mac owner and yeeeah I am preeeeeeetty snobby and quite obnoxious about it
but at least I can admit it!!! I love the post, oh yeah I think Scott has epic pwnage on Troy
November 24th, 2009 at 5:24 am
How about global warming. I found that disappointing… almost as bad as the Firefly thing.
November 24th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
I am not into Bush bad Obama good (or the reverse) because I think it is a replacement for thinking independently issue by issue. I am not an idealogue. “Vote tampering” mentioned so casually. True? Proof?
Yeah I use a mac and I am not smug. I like it, it works well for me, and I don’t like Windows. Is that okay? But at work I use Linux and that works perfectly for what we do there. I ain’t no OS idealogue.
I predicted that the Y2K thing was hyped up. There was money to be made. I know a guy that was hoarding water and doing the whole survival thing and I used to argue with him about how he was over reacting and buying into the hysteria. He was so convinced that I bought as much crow as he did bottles of water so that he would have enough to eat when the new millennium ticked in.
I read the bad reviews about the 4th Indiana Jones movie and so I didn’t watch it but yeah that is too bad. I liked the South Park treatment of it.
I would add that the unfortunate proliferation of reality shows is the pop culture crap house theatre that makes me disappointed in the state of the human mind. But I just don’t watch it.
I also wish that people would pay more attention to the human beings that they are hanging out with on the corporeal level than on their blackberry/ipod/idiotphone obsessions.
November 25th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
The LHC hasn’t actually performed the Let’s-Make-a-Black-Hole experiments yet. They tested it last year, then it broke, then it was attacked by a loaf of bread, and it’s just getting re-started now.
November 27th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
The biggest disappointment of the last few decades is that we still don’t have any of the gadgets shown in the sixties Star Trek series.
I still can not beam up or down a planet.
Where can I buy my tricorder?
Science never delivered on warp speed, intergalactic wars, deadly portable laser-guns. Shame on them!
Even all those aliens never came down for any autograph session.
I’m so disappointed I’m going to watch star wars from now on.
November 29th, 2009 at 5:35 am
Ha. I laugh at the Duke Nukem Forever thing. The mainstream has NO idea that DNF is still not the worst example of vaporware.
Oh ho no. Let’s talk GNU, folks. In particular, the part of GNU that kept it from actually being finished: The HURD. See, DN:F may have been in development before getting canned after 13 years. Lets talk about a kernel that hasn’t reached production value or even “worthwile beta” in 26 YEARS. Instead Richard Stallman went off trying to falsely claim Linux distributions are GNU variants just because they use the GNU toolchain (One of the worst logical leaps RMS has ever made, and he’s infamous for them.).
That’s irrelevant, however. The HURD has taken TWICE as long as DN:F, and STILL is nowhere complete and, lets face facts, the HURD is headed for where DN:F is now: Abandonment. There hasn’t been any significant leaps forward in the HURD for over 15 years now. The dev mailing lists are almost completely deserted.
Why?
Because Linux got there first. (Just the Linux kernel itself only took 3 years to develop. By 1994, the HURD was in “development” for 11 years and still showing no real progress.) Why? Because it didn’t get wrapped up in a political movement in the same way GNU has. Linus Torvalds has even vocally trashed guys like RMS for being idealist political assholes instead of being software developers.
To cap off this rant: I love open source a lot. But I’m no zealot. I don’t immediately fly off the handle and flame someone for using binary blobs.
November 30th, 2009 at 5:15 am
I can’t believe this ignoramus has the balls to call Lost shit. Truth is, guy probably never watched it enough to know the level of quality achieved by the television series. It’s stupid shit like this that makes me wanna kill myself and go to hell.
December 1st, 2009 at 3:00 am
HEY rhobere—The only thing that REALLY got America going and working again was WWII. And getting INTO the war FDR needed badly. So, as a typical politician, he SWORE that none of our boys would get into the war……and then knowlingly let over 2000 men and boys die in Pearl Harbor, killed by the Japanese. He WANTED US and NEEDED US in that war. And he let it all happen in a most despicable way. He may as well as dropped the bombs, torpedoes and fired all the guns himself.
He COULD have warned them all, but he didn’t. And all you lefties thing he was SUUUUUCH a great man. You all disgust me!!! And NOW you back this socialist creep!!!
December 8th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
I worked for a medium size company in which we fixed hundreds of y2k problems in their systems in the lead up to 2000….and that was just one company. And now everybody says it just turned out to be nothing…well duh! Nothing bad happened as a lot of people did a lot of work.
December 21st, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Good call on Bush but I do have my complaints. Why was Obama’s presidency not added to the list. At least post the fact that he won the Nobel pPeace Prize for nothing.
December 21st, 2009 at 10:32 pm
Dude, seriously, where’s my flying car?
December 21st, 2009 at 11:00 pm
Sher, you are aware that there is a significant amount of evidence to show that a very similar event happened on September 11th, right? You don’t see any parallels between those events?
And be careful about grouping “lefties” together… there is more to political thought than Democrat and Republican. As for President Obama; he is a politician like any other, with agendas that run contrary to the country’s best interest. But unlike Bush, he at least tries to cultivate an illusion of integrity.
December 24th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
haha faaaanf*ckingtastik!!!
kudos
that put a smile on my face
December 30th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
From a U.K. perspective: the appointment of a scrotum with a face to the position of prime minister with out the casting of a single ballot. The repercussions of which are that the nazi…that’s not quite…err..conservative party are almost guaranteed to be in power after next years elections. Liberals all over my fair country are currently doing there best to prove citizenship elsewhere…
December 30th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
I’m just glad my name is not on the list
January 27th, 2010 at 7:42 am
@ Sher- People like you give other conservatives a bad name when you go off spouting that bullshit at everybody. Actually, America had very isolationist policies prior to WWII (and in most of our country’s history) and thus was hesitant to enter into Europe’s typical intrigues. FDR was an American and in no way purposely allowed Pearl Harbor to be bombed (fucking obviously).
@ Rhobere- That being said it IS true that WWII is what pulled us out of the depression, many of FDR’s policies didn’t work AT ALL. Also you clearly have not seen more than two or three episodes of Lost. Future advice: don’t talk about things you don’t know shit about. No need to make yourself seem more stupid…
February 15th, 2010 at 7:57 pm
What about Sarah Palin? I can’t believe someone so idiotic could get into politics at all!
March 1st, 2010 at 3:32 am
The Nintendo wii and game cube . Honestly wtf?! For those of us Raised in the 90′s How in fucks name could you Try to follow up the n64 possibly the greatest console of all time with this shit. All we wanted was A 64 with better graphics And the gave us what? Dogshit!!! If that. And when we herd The wii was backwards compatible We felt a sense of Justice……. AND THEY SHORTCHANGE US!!!
Was it too much to ask that u re release goldeneye ??!!!!??!?!?
March 9th, 2010 at 7:56 pm
I really detest you ignorant left-wing pussies. I mean really fucking hate you.
June 14th, 2010 at 9:21 pm
That’s “flair,” not “flare.” Also, you never, never, never use an apostrophe to indicate a plural. (“Wachowskis, not Wachowski’s.” Never. Never never.)
The LHC really was a huge disappointment. I didn’t even realize it had been switched on again after that first fault until I read this and went to look at the wiki page.
July 20th, 2010 at 11:01 am
Remember when Republican just meant conservative and not lying, idiotic, hateful, retarded, slack-jawed, psychotic, illiterate, booger-flicking, treasonous, insufferable, bigoted douche bag?
Me neither.
James? You can suck on my liberal balls, tough guy.
July 28th, 2010 at 3:28 pm
@Frankenjerk
I may be insufferable but I’m not a lying, idiotic, hateful,retarded, slack jawed, psychotic, illiterate, booger-flicking, treasonous, insufferable, bigoted douche bag. I side with alot of conservative ideals because I believe them to be best for the American people. You have your Ideals and I have mine. Your comment was completely unnecessary!
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