Murdering Time

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