For the past two months Ron and I have been working on launching the podcast (which you can subscribe to here). For the past few weeks I’ve been working on updating the website with a more responsive theme and more flexible hosting. Everything was going so well last week and I was excited to finally go live with the podcast and the redesign. Unfortunately, my computer wasn’t as excited. In fact I’m sure it wanted to sabotage my plans because it died on Friday.
While I was excited for the launch of the podcast and the website, I was also very anxious. I didn’t realize how much time switching hosting and installing a new theme would take. Thankfully I got most of the work done before my computer gave out. Still, I’m sure some of my anxiety would have been relieved if I had my trusty MacBook with Photoshop and GarageBand.
Thankfully my computer just had an issue with its video card and it will be brought back to life. However, it was a bad computer for a few days. So in honor of its questionable behavior, here are some other bad computers.
Cylons
The Cylons from the original Battlestar Galactica were nothing more than walking toasters. They looked cool with their chrome plating and red eye, but they weren’t that intimidating. I’m not very fast, but I feel like I could outrun the original Cylon Centurions. The Cylons from the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, though, were much more intimidating. Not only did they look human, but they also had a strong vendetta against actual humans. They were more than just bad computers, but a computer wanting to kill its creators is still a bad computer.
Joshua
“Would you like to play a game?” I’ve actually never seen Wargames, but any computer that wants to start World War III is definitely a bad computer. I don’t know why I never saw Wargames. I liked Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and I liked Dabney Coleman in Cloak and Dagger. In my survey of 80s movies, though, Wargames just never made the cut. The idea of a computer taking control of the world’s nuclear arsenal was scary in 1983, but it’s even scarier in 2015. So much of our world is automated by computers. Cars now drive themselves and we carry a computer in our pocket that would put Joshua to shame. Pretty soon some kid will download an updated version of Missile Command and end up launching a bunch of missiles at North Korea.
343 Guilty Spark
This is probably my favorite bad computer on this list. 343 Guilty Spark started as an ally to Master Chief in the original Halo. By the end of the game, though, Guilty Spark had turned into a formidable foe. I hate playing zombie games so, when the Flood showed up in Halo, I kind of freaked out; the Flood were basically space zombies. Guilty Spark and his robot buddies and helped kill a lot of those space zombies. I trusted Guilty Spark, which made his inevitable betrayal that much harder to deal with.
I’d rather deal with a bad video card than a computer that wanted to push humanity to the brink of extinction. Hopefully I won’t have to worry about either for a very long time.
What are some of your favorite bad computers?
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