Things have been far too serious lately, so to offset the routine enjoyment of watching a global culture poison, overeat, kill and brutalise itself into oblivion, let’s go looking for some fun stuff to pass the time before extinction.
Nowadays every Tom Dick and Harriet can slap together web pages without much effort or time — something that thankfully most companies aren’t aware of. Website design is pretty boring and mindless, and to give you an idea of the sneaky ways bored designers can make commentary on what they’re doing, take a look at this next site, and then right click with your mouse on the picture of the smiling lady, and see what the picture is actually called. Go look at Meenakshi Mission.
So what do you do when you have way too much time on your hands? Correct, you go browsing on the net, looking for photographs of people, then you remove their eyebrows in Photoshop and upload the pictures somewhere. Take a browse (cautiously though) through the links of The Eyebrow Thief!.
Or maybe downloading a two-meg clip of someone’s idea of a homemade flame-thrower might be more your cup of tea.
Alternatively, you know how cats tend to pay attention to other cats when they see them on TV? Well, this next site decided to mess with this idea, and see how many sequences of cats looking at each other they could assemble. In other words, take a picture of a cat looking at a cat picture, then put that new pic (of two cats) on a monitor and photograph a cat looking at that picture … and on and on. Go stare at the awesomely inspired silliness of The Infinite Cat Project.
Art comes in many guises. Take for instance the weird hobby of building ships inside bottles: why stay just with ships? Go look at Rubik cubes and more, resting impossibly inside bottles at Impossible Objects.
If you’re one of those netizens who use online forums to pontificate, then you may have stared in awe at some of the interesting pix that folks seem to use in forums, by way of a personalised avatar. Take a look at a freebie online storage space with pix that you can use in forums to represent your headspace. Everything from Krusty the Clown with a knife to somewhat more insulting pix are available, complete with html tags for cutting and pasting. (If the above was just gibberish to you — don’t worry, move along! Nothing to see here!) Otherwise, go to Photobucket Online Photographs.
So you’re a Star Wars fan who hasn’t noticed that the rest of the world is laughing — what do you do? Do you rig out your car like a spaceship from the movie, complete with machine-gun mounts and R2D2 in the back — or do you keep quiet about your fetish? As usual, it’s a dumb question. Go stare at Shawn Crosby’s H-Wing Car.
And staying with cars, go look at what happens when you combine a ton of those little plastic toys that companies are forever handing out, some glue and a car roof: Car Toy Heaven.
But what do you get for the geek who has everything? Of course, ”everything” to the geek usually involves pixels, those tiny dots that combine to make colours on screen. So why not buy them: Plastic Pixel Blocks.
Jim Carrey brought the strange and odd life of Andy Kaufman to the screen in Man in the Moon — and 20 years after his death, Kaufman is back. Maybe. It wouldn’t be that surprising for the ultimate prankster to have faked his death and stepped away from the fuss and bother for 20 years. Go try to work out the truth behind the ongoing enigma of Andy Kaufman: Alive.
Comic-strip time. It’s deceptively simple, it’s angry and it’s a weekly. Go take a look at the rather addictive comic strip known as Angry Little Girls.
Advertising is everywhere now, and we’re soaking up most of the imagery whether we like it or not. Glossy women, macho men, idyllic scenes of impossible-to-achieve happy families, cute kids, housewives fixated on cleaning, ”easy” credit cards, women-as-sluts clutching ice creams. You name it, the propagandists of advertising are working hard to make you buy unneeded products and get into debt and stay there. For a range of wonderful images and graphics that you can use to fight off the ongoing barrage of visual pollution that advertisements and the government are waving at us, go to Subvertise.
Staying in the subversion field, if you’ve got a message for someone and the local card shop doesn’t have anything suitable, then why not browse through the evil and funny cards available at So What, You Suck!.
And still more goodies. This next site takes a similar approach to the classic The Onion in satirising society at large, with fake news items and assorted downloadable fake but real-looking ”government forms”.(Try the downloadable four-page ”Claim Form for Surveillance Benefit”.) Why not download some of these, adjust for local conditions and try sending them to our local government, to see what happens? Go to The UK Department of Social Scrutiny.
For The Onion, as mentioned — the ultimate news and satire site — go to The Onion. (Don’t forget to look at its The Onion in History section at the bottom left of the page.)
If on the other hand you like your humour wickedly dry and decidedly British in character, then you simply have to spend some time at The Slingshot: The Great British Magazine for Young Chaps.
Hopefully you’ve managed to avoid this year’s big pseudo-hetero ”snails rather than oysters” Hollywood excreta known as Troy and are cleverly waiting for the release of the much classier flick The Day after Tomorrow. If you’ve managed to avoid seeing Troy, but are faintly curious about the story, read Troy in Fifteen Minutes.
Keeping in the disaster zone, we’ve all killed food at some point in our lives. (My own contribution towards a major Homer Simpson moment involved boiling condensed milk and forgetting about it — the resulting explosion gave a kitchen floor and ceiling a nice coat of sticky brown gunk.) That confession aside, go stare at the wondrous joys of The Museum of Burnt Food.
Then, for disasters of a different sort: if you’re curious about how hardcore Christians are viewing reality (or at least, the reality of American culture) go take a look at the often funny, but always interesting, ChildCare Action Project — specifically its special ”Christian Alert” reviews of movies, which have to be seen to be believed. Go to CAP Reviews.
Of course, you could always take a look at the rather grim pictures that were taken showing United States troops playing with their prisoners at Abu Ghraib Pictures.
And boredom struck this week, so I found another form of creative expression: comic strips. Using a simple interface online, you can make your own comic strips for whatever evil purposes you like. As an example — and at time of writing I’d only made one — take a look at Ian Frasers’s Comic Strip.
(If the link expires, browse through the strips for Ian Fraser’s Strip One). For the main page, where you can also fiddle and come up with your own comic strips, or browse through other people’s creations, go to the amazing Comic Strip Creator.
Until the next time, if the apocalypse doesn’t get me.