The Most Annoying Viral Distractions of 2010

9. Wannabe Na’vi makeup tutorials

Who wants to look like Lady Gaga when you can look like a taller, more agile, more brightly colored version of yourself? These make-up gurus teach you, from firsthand experience, how it’s really done on Pandora. The art of bluing yourself has reached new, more highly evolved heights.

8. “Inception” trailer parodies

While the movie blew the minds of many this summer as they tried to follow the many dreams within dreams and kicks and unexplained constructs, trailer parodies soon appeared to critique the overly serious tone of the film. These addictive parodies span from an a cappella version of the theme song to a Dora the Explorer episode. She’s so cute!

7. “Baby” by Justin Bieber

He may have only been 13, but Justin Bieber met his first love, his baby left him, and he was like, “baby, baby, baby, oh.” The combination of his baby-smooth voice, and baby-soft hair, and our love for babies had us singing along as if we were 13-year-olds with our very own haircuts named after us. Justin Bieber may be young, but we all feel the depth of his love repeated in those four heartfelt words. You say there are only technically two? Shush you. Shush.

6. “Glee” plot twists

This band of high school drama kings and queens can be streamed to the comfort of our laptops any day of the week. Whether it’s a real pregnancy, a fake pregnancy, or some other question of inter-glee incest, it’s the high school musical soap opera we’ve always wanted. Like Sue Sylvester’s deliciously cruel comments, we hate to love the show’s gimmicks, but at the same time justify our love by chanting the well-practiced mantra “We only watch it for the music.”

5. “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On”

Marcel is a shell with shoes on, and he breaks our hearts. We wish we were invited to his salad parties and we wish we could be there to help him lift his crayon—or anything at all, really. We love Marcel, with his one googly eye, two Barbie sneakers, and squeaky little wobbly voice, and we can’t help letting him tell us about his tiny life and show us around his tiny world (at incredibly high resolution) over and over again.

4. Old Spice Guy Commercials

It’s a man with rippling abs and a white towel. He’s on a boat. No, he’s on a horse. Did he just chainsaw a table and then go into a swan dive? He has no mustache. Oh, he has one. NO, IT CAN’T BE. TWO! Are those diamonds? With an aftertaste reminiscent of the Chuck Norris jokes, we can’t help but watch that swan dive one more time to figure out how he got those jeans on in one take.

3. “Pants On the Ground” by General Larry Platt

Remember the days when the winners of American Idol were more famous than the people who never made it past the auditions? General Larry Platt proves that it’s not all about winning. In the Atlanta auditions for the 2010 season, the 62-year-old performed his own original song “Pants On the Ground,” to the amusement of the judges and millions of viewers. The song, with its repetitive lyrics and blatant disregard for rhyme schemes, was picked up by a record label. To both our delight and chagrin, “Pants On the Ground,” has been extended from its original 40-second clip to a catchy three-minute public service theme song. Thank you, General Platt, for keeping us from looking like fools.

2. Robot Unicorn Attack

It has a magical robot unicorn. We don’t know how it happened, but it has pixies and rainbow attacks and two addictively simple buttons to control your fate. It may be the sadness in that broken unicorn’s eyes after being blown to smithereens, or our inability to accept the Robot Unicorn’s claim “You will fail!” Either way, we inevitably add to the 32 million plays of a game that always ends the same way with four hours left to write that paper and the game’s eerie theme song “Always,” by Erasure, stuck in our heads.

1. I Saw You Harvard

A CS50 final project that proved to be the creepiest way to fill a newly-instated J-Term that seemed to stretch into eternity. Here we discovered both Harvard students’ propensity for precise attention to detail driven by sexual frustration and our inability to look away from these all-too-revealing posts. With the new decade, we ushered in an era of unabashed fascination with discreetly watching others and then (hopefully drunkenly) telling the rest of the world about it.

—Whitney E. Adair is the outgoing Design Exec. Melissa C. Wong is the incoming Design Exec. They often fantasize that they go to Hogwarts and are very easily distra...