Everyone has too much time on their hands. I know, I know, not you, the busy little activist reading this site. You're taking classes part time while holding down two jobs, caring for your pet hedgehog and you are involved with the local 2nd amendment club and boy oh boy you have no time.
But as an exercise, sit down and think about your day. Try to account for every hour, every minute of that time period. If you are an extremely busy, active person, there will always be at least a two hour period that went to TV, video games, interwebs surfing or, more likely, you will be unable to even account for the time that went missing.
On the other hand you could be a lazy, lethargic, layabout, low-life loser who has hours and hours to kill each day. That works too. Either way, that pesky time needs to be rounded up and executed gang-land style. It disrespected the local don, and now it has to go.
Presenting: The Interwebs Junkie's list of the 6 top time-murdering sites on the web. Behold, a veritable armory of weapons used to spill the blood of extra time. Let's get started:
6. www.youtube.com - I know what you're thinking. "Wow, interwebs junkie, what an obscure site! How long did you have to dig to find this gem? I'd never heard of it before, and never would have found it without you!" I can hear the tones of sarcasm echoing off the walls of this forum, I get it.
But youtube is a great time killer, and I feel this list would be incomplete without it. You may already know of youtube for providing your favorite music set to some high school kid's insipid slide show of his chubby girlfriend. But some people also upload original content for your viewing pleasure.
Some stuff, like sneezing panda, or chocolate rain, have already become humongous interwebs memes. A lesser-known but equally hilarious video is the evil baby, here. Charlie bit me is also good, but you've heard of that.
Youtube also, like all creepy google-owned things, keeps track of everything you've ever looked at, favorited or commented on to suggest new videos it thinks you'll like. This was recommended for me. I'm not sure that says anything good about my intelligence level, but man! Those trucks are getting creamed!
Youtube has a particularly vile commentary community. I think there are more trolls than normal posters, all trolling themselves in a vicious cycle of hate-spewing nonsense. I've actually found some fairly educated flaming, such as a series of comments debating where written language was first invented, or a group of Pakistanis arguing over the fate of Kashmir in the comments of a cricket game, but for the most part it's uninspired, profanity-laced dreck.
5. http://cheezburger.com/sites This URL isn't immediately recognizable, though you're probably thinking of the famous icanhascheezburger, which is but one section of this site. Genius in its simplicity, the site's formula is: random pic + funny caption = interwebs success.
Chief among its myriad of sites is incanhascheezburger, which does this with cat pics. Another section, ROFLrazzi does this with celebrity pics, or stills from movies. Ihasahotdog is this with dog pics. You get the idea.
The Fail blog is also a part of this site. That site will depress you faster than people of walmart and awkward family photos (both popular websites thanks to savvy facebook spamming). Epicwinftw (epic win for the win? Isn't that like ATM machine?) is the opposite, and will cheer your right up.
Overall a great series of sites, each of which could qualify for this list. I don't know why pics of cats in silly positions are so addicting, but to deny their power is foolishness.
4. www.read.gov This site has thousands (if not millions) of books, articles, essays and podcasts from any possible author (as long as copyright stuff has fallen through, so not too many current works) and is enough to keep you entertained with the finest literary works ever written for the rest of your mortal life.
What's that you say? Books are lame? Well, I take offense. Sure the interwebs is mainly used for goofing off, but what's wrong with using it for some learning every now and then? Sure, Dickens may not have the zip or zing of a well-shot youtube video, by he's got to be worth a little of your time...
Right?
Okay fine, I never go to that site either except to hunt down works by H.P. Lovecraft I don't already own. There, you caught me. The reader is really nice though, and makes it feel like your actually reading the book... which is probably more of a turn off than anything to the average interwebs junkie. Moving on...
3. http://www.cracked.com/ This site, the successor to the magazine (do you guys remember that? Kind of like Mad? No? Okay, I'm old, moving on...) basically is several comedy writers writing blogs, composing top ten lists, and providing an acerbic, cynical look at popular media.
The reviews are great, the rants are stellar, and the photoshop competitions (entries provided by the readership) are remarkable, but the lists are what bring it home for this site. The lists are amazing, and are updated at the rate of 3-4 fresh ones a day. At the end of every list are links to related lists, so your browser window will quickly become overpopulated with new tabs.
It's possible to kill off hours at this site without even noting any time has passed. List after list flies by, each taking 10-15 minutes to read, and before you know it you've read twelve of them.
Though dubious (at best) with accuracy or journalistic credibility (and who needs that anyways) th e se were some excellent lists when I visited the site, and as mentioned before they update constantly. Warning: by reading those, you might start clicking links, which will cost you the better part of the day. Don't even go for it if you have things to do.
2. http://www.bubblebox.com/ Everyone has their own interwebs gaming site, but I think this is the strongest. They add 2-3 new strangely addicting, simple to play games every day, each one taking a few hours to beat. You could devote your life to this and still never play through the full content of every game hosted.
The irony is, though living in a house with an Xbox360 and Wii, I spend far more time gaming with stupid little free flash games on the interwebs than I do with those gargantuan systems. (Is that irony? I can never get it right).
They have all of the little games nicely divided and organized, easily searchable and nicely listed. There are adventure, action and racing games, all standard fare, and then an entire section devoted to girl games (whatever that means).
The commentary community site here is worse than facebook's. Seriously, go to any game then look down at the comment area (you'll need to vote to see it). I don't think there are anything but trolls there, and troll feeders, probably just baiting trolls to troll. It's like a triple-layer troll sundae with troll sauce on top.
(This paragraph is where I was planning on copy/pasting some horrible comments I found there just to give you an example. Unfortunately, they were just too silly and offensive.)
1. www.tvtropes.org What do you get if you take out what little accountability is in wikipedia, add in the sub-human fan base of youtube and then mix with a heaping helping of nerd? This site is the answer.
Readers of my blog could probably have seen this coming. I am in love with this site. We were married online back in '06, and for our honeymoon we went to www.tvtropes.org.
Basically it gives run downs of popular media (tv only originally, but it's expanded to include EVERYTHING). Each site has a number of tropes (kind of like cliches, but cooler) that it contains. Of course, all of these are in coded interwebs speak, so you have to open then into a new tab to find out what they are. And in those definitions, you find more tropes listed, and more shows. So you have to find out what they are... and so on, and so on, until you wake up with qwertyface not knowing when the last time you ate was.
Seriously, on a scale of time killing rating from 1 t0 10, this site is 10+ : time-genocide. I've wasted days on this site and unearthed not even a fraction of a percentage of its total content, which is 99.99% user-supplied. I've edited a few articles myself and posted a few reviews.
Sign up for yourself (it's laughably easy) just to get a feel of how tested these "experts" are. It's basically a nerd fest of nerds nerdily arguing about their nerdy pet nerd shows; a raucous good time, if you're in to that.
Okay, chances are that if you've followed some of those links it's taken you two days to finish this post (sorry about that). Have I missed any? Feel free to flame at me/defend your favorite time killing site below.
Further Diving -
Sites Mentioned:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage - TV tropes!
http://cheezburger.com/sites
Gaming Sites:
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=game+sites&aq=f&aqi=g-s1g3g-s1g5&oq=&fp=64df356c6a3f8304
Great Article on Youtube Memes:
http://mashable.com/2009/05/25/youtube-video-memes/ - Great article on youtube memes
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
The language of the Interwebs
The task of making a dictionary for any language is a daunting one. Natural languages, like English, change over time, so any dictionary must be updated constantly to keep pace with the new words and usages.
For the interwebs, there is no dictionary, and likely never will be one. Each major forum has its own dialect of interwebs speak, completely indecipherable to outsiders. For instance, my girlfriend loves the site cuteoverload, which uses a variation of lolspeak with words like "prosh" for precious and "nosicles" for animal noses. The baby-speak style of that dialect fits well with the overall purpose of the site, which is to be nauseatingly cute.
Though I speak many variations of classic interwebs speak, my main dialect is tvtropes. A fascinating site that will have you opening more tabs than can fit on a browser window. It is in the reviews, forums and wiki-like edits of that site I learned what brain bleach, nightmare fuel and an ear worm were.
The language there is a good example of the constant morphing that goes on. For instance: one trope is called the crowning moment of awesome, meaning a really cool action or scene for a character or show in general. That mutated into the tropes "crowning music of awesome," for really good music, "crowning moment of funny," for funny scenes, and for the opposite, "dethroning moment of suck." Of course, if the scene involves coronation, it becomes an "awesome moment of crowning," an example of the fickle, whimsical nature of interwebs linguistic morphology.
Game communities, like the overbearing, unstoppably popular MMORPG, WoW, are infamous for their indecipherable jargon, usually centering around cryptic acronyms. Though I'm no WoW'er myself, I have tried to max my HP so I could tank for someone with high DPS while LFG for a raid. (Real WoW players will be embarrassed at my lame attempt to emulate them; it's been years since I've played).
I frequent the forums of the board game, Arkham Horror, which has its own unique dialect. The AOOs of IH are considered nigh unbeatable. Such communication shortcuts can be beneficial for long time users, but are often frustrating to those new to the community. Often, a newb will have to lurk for some time before they can even begin to speak the lingo.
Perhaps the most commonly known interwebs language is lolspeak. It is most popularly embodied in its incarnations of lolcats, which have crawled from the darkest recesses of the interwebs and into public life. It features terrible grammar, frequent misspellings and constant allusions to lolcat memes like ceiling cat or "in ur ___, ___-ing ur ___."
It's a fool's errand to try to document any sort of history of interwebs culture, but the main theory, at least the one proposed by the creator of the infamous icanhascheezburger, in this techspeak interview, is that lolspeak originated from infamous message boards like somethingawful and fark.
There, a little digging on the message boards finds that the most common theory states it likely descended from 1337 speak. 1337 speak was developed by interwebs users trying to evade filters which ran very simple detection code for words. This is the language we get such old-school gems as "haxx0rz" "teh suxx0rz" and the ever-popular "n00b".
Though the spelling of 1337 speak differs greatly from spelling of lolcats, the overall intentionally awful grammar is roughly the same, so the theory seems sound. The language has taken off in popularity, to ridiculous proportions. For instance, the Constitution of the United States is now being translated into lolspeak, apparently by people with far too much time on their hands, and, well... there is this: a bible written in lolspeak. Does it speak ill of me that I kind of want that? Or, more simply put, I can haz lolspeak bible?
A small excerpt from that site:
John 3:16: "So liek teh Ceiling Kitteh lieks teh ppl lots and he sez 'Oh hai I givez u me only kitteh and ifs u beleeves him u wont evr diez no moar, kthxbai!'"
Truly, these are the signs of the end times.
The only way to learn the language of a specific site is through practice and patience. Oh, wait, no you don't, I forgot; we have the interwebs. If you don't know it you can just google it. Instant gratification. The only danger is letting your newly acquired grammar bleed into real life; nobody knows what I'm talking about when I say "Man, I've got an ear worm that won't quit." Instead of a song stuck in my head, they likely think I have some disgusting infection.
In the real world, language is still by comparison to the word of the interwebs. Part of the fun, the community comes from a shared (or not so shared) esoteric language of memes, phrases and nonsense words. If you know any witty or interesting interwebs language, point it out in the comments section, with a brief definition and any background you can muster. Maybe it is impossible to have a complete dictionary, but let's have a highlight section here.
Diving Deeper:
On lolspeak:
http://speaklolspeak.com/ - Includes a great translator.
The Basics:
http://www.todaysparent.com/article.jsp?content=5214
Lolcat Refernces:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcat - A history of lolcats. Dates back to the early 1800's!
http://materyalistceseyler.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/funny-pictures-ceiling-cat-creates-man1.jpg
http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/im-in-ur-office-earnin-ur-salry.jpg
Tvtrope Lingo:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EarWorm
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NightmareFuel
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BrainBleach
WoW Lingo:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=75427760&sid=1 - A ton of it.
On 1337 speak:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet
Infamous Forums:
http://www.somethingawful.com/
http://www.fark.com/
For the interwebs, there is no dictionary, and likely never will be one. Each major forum has its own dialect of interwebs speak, completely indecipherable to outsiders. For instance, my girlfriend loves the site cuteoverload, which uses a variation of lolspeak with words like "prosh" for precious and "nosicles" for animal noses. The baby-speak style of that dialect fits well with the overall purpose of the site, which is to be nauseatingly cute.
Though I speak many variations of classic interwebs speak, my main dialect is tvtropes. A fascinating site that will have you opening more tabs than can fit on a browser window. It is in the reviews, forums and wiki-like edits of that site I learned what brain bleach, nightmare fuel and an ear worm were.
The language there is a good example of the constant morphing that goes on. For instance: one trope is called the crowning moment of awesome, meaning a really cool action or scene for a character or show in general. That mutated into the tropes "crowning music of awesome," for really good music, "crowning moment of funny," for funny scenes, and for the opposite, "dethroning moment of suck." Of course, if the scene involves coronation, it becomes an "awesome moment of crowning," an example of the fickle, whimsical nature of interwebs linguistic morphology.
Game communities, like the overbearing, unstoppably popular MMORPG, WoW, are infamous for their indecipherable jargon, usually centering around cryptic acronyms. Though I'm no WoW'er myself, I have tried to max my HP so I could tank for someone with high DPS while LFG for a raid. (Real WoW players will be embarrassed at my lame attempt to emulate them; it's been years since I've played).
I frequent the forums of the board game, Arkham Horror, which has its own unique dialect. The AOOs of IH are considered nigh unbeatable. Such communication shortcuts can be beneficial for long time users, but are often frustrating to those new to the community. Often, a newb will have to lurk for some time before they can even begin to speak the lingo.
Perhaps the most commonly known interwebs language is lolspeak. It is most popularly embodied in its incarnations of lolcats, which have crawled from the darkest recesses of the interwebs and into public life. It features terrible grammar, frequent misspellings and constant allusions to lolcat memes like ceiling cat or "in ur ___, ___-ing ur ___."
It's a fool's errand to try to document any sort of history of interwebs culture, but the main theory, at least the one proposed by the creator of the infamous icanhascheezburger, in this techspeak interview, is that lolspeak originated from infamous message boards like somethingawful and fark.
There, a little digging on the message boards finds that the most common theory states it likely descended from 1337 speak. 1337 speak was developed by interwebs users trying to evade filters which ran very simple detection code for words. This is the language we get such old-school gems as "haxx0rz" "teh suxx0rz" and the ever-popular "n00b".
Though the spelling of 1337 speak differs greatly from spelling of lolcats, the overall intentionally awful grammar is roughly the same, so the theory seems sound. The language has taken off in popularity, to ridiculous proportions. For instance, the Constitution of the United States is now being translated into lolspeak, apparently by people with far too much time on their hands, and, well... there is this: a bible written in lolspeak. Does it speak ill of me that I kind of want that? Or, more simply put, I can haz lolspeak bible?
A small excerpt from that site:
John 3:16: "So liek teh Ceiling Kitteh lieks teh ppl lots and he sez 'Oh hai I givez u me only kitteh and ifs u beleeves him u wont evr diez no moar, kthxbai!'"
Truly, these are the signs of the end times.
The only way to learn the language of a specific site is through practice and patience. Oh, wait, no you don't, I forgot; we have the interwebs. If you don't know it you can just google it. Instant gratification. The only danger is letting your newly acquired grammar bleed into real life; nobody knows what I'm talking about when I say "Man, I've got an ear worm that won't quit." Instead of a song stuck in my head, they likely think I have some disgusting infection.
In the real world, language is still by comparison to the word of the interwebs. Part of the fun, the community comes from a shared (or not so shared) esoteric language of memes, phrases and nonsense words. If you know any witty or interesting interwebs language, point it out in the comments section, with a brief definition and any background you can muster. Maybe it is impossible to have a complete dictionary, but let's have a highlight section here.
Diving Deeper:
On lolspeak:
http://speaklolspeak.com/ - Includes a great translator.
The Basics:
http://www.todaysparent.com/article.jsp?content=5214
Lolcat Refernces:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcat - A history of lolcats. Dates back to the early 1800's!
http://materyalistceseyler.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/funny-pictures-ceiling-cat-creates-man1.jpg
http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/im-in-ur-office-earnin-ur-salry.jpg
Tvtrope Lingo:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EarWorm
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NightmareFuel
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BrainBleach
WoW Lingo:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=75427760&sid=1 - A ton of it.
On 1337 speak:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet
Infamous Forums:
http://www.somethingawful.com/
http://www.fark.com/
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Deep Waters
This blog is about the culture of the interwebs. Not the internet, that formal, serious revolution in culture and information access that is changing the world around us as we speak, but the interwebs - that place of unending pathways leading deeper into the entertaining, the inane, the nonsensical, the beautiful and the horrific that you traverse when you should be working.
Most people are mere waders into the ocean of the interwebs. They stick to well-populated islands like facebook, gmail or myspace, unwilling to swim into deeper waters. But some hear a siren call and find themselves pulled - by curiousity, boredom, or some other unameable force - into the depths of the interwebs. They allow themselves to be pulled deeper, sucked down into the infinite murky abyss... they find fascinating secrets and wondrous treasures.
Diving deeper, into the ocean trenches of the interwebs, they find entire cities built by their fellow explorers... forums, imageboards, chatrooms and wikis made by and for interwebs people. There they join communities of like-minded souls. Media consumers, meme-chasers and online gamers. Entire civilizations form around sites with their own cultures, etiquette and language.
But the call to dive deeper is always present. There is no bottom to this ocean, and divers find more exotic and novel treasures the further they go. Images no man has seen before, websites of infinite entertainment, online flash games of unlimited simplicity and addicting value... these are the wonders the divers of the interwebs seek, to be brought up and displayed at the great cities of the interwebs for all to see.
And there is always more to explore, always more to see, always more to find. No matter how far an interwebs person goes, it is never far enough. Eventually, they become an interwebs junkie, and it is this creature that this site is for. A survivor of flamewars, a baiter of trolls. An admin, or a forum necromancer. A noob pwner or a leet haxxor.
The interwebs junkie is a jaded creature. They've seen it all... at least in images. They've done irony, ironic irony, double and triple irony. They've had over 20 tabs open at once. They're a member of at least a dozen forums. They understand what the GIFT is, and how they can avoid being a part of it. They've said lol in real life, and they meant it. They have at least two junk e-mails to sign up for sites online.
I am an interwebs junkie, and as one, I'll seek out the best, most interesting sites I can find for my fellow divers. And if you, the reader and fellow interwebs junkie can find better, I ask you to share. Because this site is another outpost of the deep, another bulwark of civilization and exploration in the great vastness of the expanse. Here I will discuss, analyze, criticize and link to anything and everything of interest on the interwebs, the more esoteric and convoluted the better.
So join me, my fellow junkies. Let us dive as deep as possible, into the farthest crevices and reaches of the interwebs. Like the great explorers of old, we will chart out new territory, see new sights, and travel into the deep waters of the interwebs.
Most people are mere waders into the ocean of the interwebs. They stick to well-populated islands like facebook, gmail or myspace, unwilling to swim into deeper waters. But some hear a siren call and find themselves pulled - by curiousity, boredom, or some other unameable force - into the depths of the interwebs. They allow themselves to be pulled deeper, sucked down into the infinite murky abyss... they find fascinating secrets and wondrous treasures.
Diving deeper, into the ocean trenches of the interwebs, they find entire cities built by their fellow explorers... forums, imageboards, chatrooms and wikis made by and for interwebs people. There they join communities of like-minded souls. Media consumers, meme-chasers and online gamers. Entire civilizations form around sites with their own cultures, etiquette and language.
But the call to dive deeper is always present. There is no bottom to this ocean, and divers find more exotic and novel treasures the further they go. Images no man has seen before, websites of infinite entertainment, online flash games of unlimited simplicity and addicting value... these are the wonders the divers of the interwebs seek, to be brought up and displayed at the great cities of the interwebs for all to see.
And there is always more to explore, always more to see, always more to find. No matter how far an interwebs person goes, it is never far enough. Eventually, they become an interwebs junkie, and it is this creature that this site is for. A survivor of flamewars, a baiter of trolls. An admin, or a forum necromancer. A noob pwner or a leet haxxor.
The interwebs junkie is a jaded creature. They've seen it all... at least in images. They've done irony, ironic irony, double and triple irony. They've had over 20 tabs open at once. They're a member of at least a dozen forums. They understand what the GIFT is, and how they can avoid being a part of it. They've said lol in real life, and they meant it. They have at least two junk e-mails to sign up for sites online.
I am an interwebs junkie, and as one, I'll seek out the best, most interesting sites I can find for my fellow divers. And if you, the reader and fellow interwebs junkie can find better, I ask you to share. Because this site is another outpost of the deep, another bulwark of civilization and exploration in the great vastness of the expanse. Here I will discuss, analyze, criticize and link to anything and everything of interest on the interwebs, the more esoteric and convoluted the better.
So join me, my fellow junkies. Let us dive as deep as possible, into the farthest crevices and reaches of the interwebs. Like the great explorers of old, we will chart out new territory, see new sights, and travel into the deep waters of the interwebs.
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