The WTF Decade: A Retrospective
In a decade filled with so much fake “fake news” – news that’s real but people call it ‘fake’ because they don’t like the information communicated in it – some intrepid faux newsmen have bravely eschewed the lazy route of merely injecting our own bias into an otherwise true story, instead weaving entirely false narratives from whole cloth.
In other words, writers like me spent the decade providing you with the real fake news, stories you knew you could rely on to be completely, egregiously, blatantly and often unacceptably false.
Oh sure, occasionally our work would contain things which can be considered facts (Utah is real name of a real U.S. state, for example, and the legislature there really did declare porn a public health crisis), but we faux newsmen of integrity never let those facts get in the way of telling a good, false story.
With that spirit in mind, here are 10 of the best, falsest, most meanspirited and least fair articles which were featured in YNOT’s “WTF!” section since its inception around the middle of the decade.
#10: Whereas Utah Sucks Anyway – As referenced above, this is one of those rare WTF stories which contains some actual facts. One of those facts is that I did go on a family trip to Utah as a kid – but it wasn’t my dad who got ticketed for driving 57 in a 55 zone, it was my sister and she was doing 70, easy. It’s also true, of course, that Utah passed a toothless, symbolic, nonbinding resolution declaring porn a public health crisis, starting a trend which has since been copied by a bunch of other states with lousy nightlife and legislators with way too much time on their hands.
#9: Golf Tournament Denies Porn Industry Ties – To keep things straight after the establishment of the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee (APAC), representatives of the Asia-Pacific Amateur Championship (also APAC) made it clear they were not associated with the adult industry – although a spokesman for the tournament did concede to YNOT WTF that golf is a game “with plenty of holes, balls and strokes.”
#8: Porn Job Offer Publicity Stunt Market Booming – You know the deal – any time some celebrity disgraces him/herself, or a good looking random person becomes suddenly famous for being accused of doing something heinous, some bright bulb in the porn industry offers them a job as a publicity stunt. It’s some seriously lame, tired, dead-horse-flogging shit, but it’s the only fucking idea some people have for getting their company’s name in the news, so we might as well get used to it happening for another decade or two.
#7: AI Porn Detector Bemoans ‘Extreme Porn’ – In some countries, they’re using artificial intelligence to detect “extreme” porn (and, most likely, any sign of political dissent among the less-happy citizens of their respective republics) – and as this article reveals, those poor AI porn bots are suffering terribly due to the filthy perversions of their human overlords.
#6: Superman: Porn Industry Should Drop My Videos, Too – When the Man of Steel heard that the adult industry had largely stopped distributing Flash videos, the deeply confused Son of Jor-El called upon pornographers to lay off making porn parodies of his films, too. Sadly, his plea came too late to prevent the release of C.V. Joint Norelco’s Spanish-language Superman porn parody, Que Esto No Es Superhombre Regresa Tres Equis.
#5: Entire Adult Industry Nominated for Award, Signing at Some Booth – Feeling a little overwhelmed by the number of press releases he was receiving announcing award nominations and booth appearances, an adult industry journalist finally lost his shit and tried to combine all the press releases into a single, unified promotional narrative.
#4: Tila Tequila Now 4th on Neo-Nazi Porn Star Chart – And now, she’s fourth on our decade-closing WTF countdown, too.
#3: TartElderberry’s Guide To Rank Writing – Every so often, adult companies publish helpful how-to guides in press release form. In this case, it was very helpfilled guide from TartElderberry on how are people to writing well and stuff and how important it is to has good gramahr, spieling, senseable form-matting, the importance of avoiding redundancy, keeping sentences really, really, really short and above all else, avoiding redundancy and redundancy, even in WTF articles.
#2: Pinedale Forum Regrets Show Timing, Venue Choice – Back in 2015, choosing Pinedale, Montana as the venue for an early April adult trade show seemed like a mistake to Pinedale Forum founder Reggie Cheney – but with his primary competition now discontinued, Cheney may get the last laugh at his upcoming, again-rebranded event in Paintsville, Kentucky.
#1: Stunner: Porn Star Admits to Being Ex-NFL Kicker – In an example of how difficult it is to keep anything secret in the Social Media Age, adult performer Edmond Cetera was outed for a truly shameful chapter in his past – his days as a backup placekicker in the NFL. It was a revelation from which Cetera’s fictional career never fully recovered; rumor has it he is now a born-again Mormon working as a porn addiction counselor in rural Utah.