The History of Funeratic (2020)

Enbies

January 5: Funeratic collects plenty of miscellaneous biographical data about its members if they choose to share it, but other than name and photograph, the data point that comes up most often is gender. Across the text of the website, there are many instances where the member's declared gender affects their pronouns (ie. he), pronoun objects (him), and possessives (his). But there are two problems with Funeratic's handling of this: One, it forces a binary male/female declaration when more and more people identify outside of that binary, and two, it forces a declaration of gender when it's more pertinent simply to ask for the person's preferred pronoun terms, which is all that matters as far as Funeratic is concerned. Scott codes this overdue change into the site, and it's not long before several transgender members are more comfortable changing their pronouns, while one member chooses non-binary pronouns. It would be increasingly hard for Funeratic to say that it's welcoming to all without making everyone feel that way.

Parasite

February 9: The annual Predict the Oscars contest has seen participation by strangers since its very first year in 2000 and especially starting in 2004, but the trend accelerates in the late 2010s. In 2020, when the Korean film Parasite wins Best Picture, over 70 people participate in the contest, and only five of those are either a Funeratic member or a friend of Scott. Despite the seeming appropriateness of the term "parasite," Scott is in fact happy to host the game for most of these strangers, since the few that talk to him are polite. But a few people create fake accounts to enter multiple times and boost their odds, requiring Scott to build an admin tool to find and eliminate duplicate accounts quickly, since so many of them appear on the evening of the Oscars ceremony. It's hard to tell for certain exactly how many real people enter, but it's definitely a lot, perennially making Oscar night Funeratic's most active night of the year.

Virus

February 28: Just as COVID-19 takes over the world in 2020, so too does it dominate Tragic Comedy. There are several discussions inspired by the coronavirus, but the main one dwarfs most other TC discussions, becoming the site's most active conversation in four years. And just as the year is full of anxiety, depression, and rage at the news, the conversation is among the most negative (albeit cathartic) that the authors have had in a long time, registering their fear and anger when they and their loved ones are exposed to the deadly disease. In a difficult year for everyone, the authors find comfort in each other's contact through the forum.

Zoom

May 20: Chris Lemler has a suggestion to cheer up Funeratic members during the awful year that is 2020: Meeting online using a video conferencing service. Initially via Zoom on May 20 and later several times via Google Meet, members meet on several weeknights over the course of the summer and fall to chat, commisserate, share good news, and (inevitably for Funeratic) play a series of trivia games. Brenda West, Chris Lemler, Denise Sawicki, Erik Bates, Jason Lemler, Kelly Lee, LaVonne Lemler, Lori Lancaster, Matthew Preston, Pam Bates, Samir Mehta, Scott Hardie, and Steve West all participate at one point or another. The trivia games are such a hit that several authors take turns running them. When Scott runs a game of rebuses that spell out the names of classic rock artists, he copies the game to TC and expands upon it, giving players online who missed it more opportunities to play.

Sanguisuge

August 17: Over the years, Scott has made quite a few unfortunate mistakes by using a photo of the wrong person to make a celebrity goo. This happens again when Steve West makes a goo of actor Carlos Villarías and accidentally uses a photo of Bela Lugosi, both of whom played Dracula on screen. After Erik Bates alerts Scott to the situation, the rules compel Scott to delete the incorrect guesses and allow players to guess again, but late in the week, that's not much help. Chris Lemler points out that the right photo is essential to solving the goo, so Scott makes a long overdue change to the rules: In this and all future errors of the same nature, the images will be completely replaced and the goo will be given an extension of another seven days, although the season won't be extended the same way. The erroneous goo of Villarías even inspires a do-over goo of Legosi, a pair of vampires to mark the occasion when the game stopped some needless bloodletting.

Peak

October 31: The era of "Peak TV" has already slowed down Thorough Movie Reviews, as an explosion of streaming services with endless new television shows to watch has resulted in less time for seeing films, even as it has made films generally easier to find. But content exclusivity on certain services forces another change: After almost a decade of using Netflix widgets to sum up each film on the same page where it is reviewed, Scott finds it impossible to continue, since so many films are coming out exclusively on other platforms, a trend rapidly accelerated by the pandemic. Scott eliminates the Netflix widgets in favor of using an API to display data from the Internet Movie Database, which is both a superior user experience (bigger poster art, more data on display) and a pain to convert (each of the approximately 1,200 past films in Funeratic's database must be manually updated).

Wonderful

December 30: The movie Wonder Woman 1984, officially titled WW84, is released on streaming while theaters are still mostly closed mid-pandemic. It quickly becomes the most-discussed and most controversial movie in years on Funeratic. Scott likes the movie for its big ideas, while Erik Bates and Evie Totty are frustrated by its flaws, and Samir Mehta is very disappointed in it. The discussion leads all over the place, from cults of personality around politicians to whether sex during a Hollywood "body swap" qualifies as sexual assault. The movie's tepid support is enough to land it on the site's "Best Movies of 2020" feature, in part because so many different voters saw it, but in a rare pandemic fluke, it's the only superhero flick on the list for a change.