Internet Fun

The vagarities of life have made me fall very far behind in my websurfing and weblogging, but here are a few things that I have been enjoying as I have been catching up on my RSS feeds: The Pre-Ninja Program – a proposal for a new academic track by a community college administrator Writers Against Piracy – the Improv Everywhere people take on your local public library Girls watching Sneezing Baby Panda – it’s just layers on top of layers of adorable (here is the sneezing panda video the girls are watching) I have no need for a 1470 piece … Continue reading Summer? Yes, please!

I wish I could remember where I saw a link to this odd little jigsaw puzzle, but it is very cool. Especially once you scroll down and read the directions and realize you can rotate pieces as well as drag them around the board to fit them together. It is both cute and fun. If you like that type of little game, or enjoy “brain teaser” type puzzles, the site as a whole is worth a browse. A lot of the games are fairly old, but the Flash implementations are quite nice. The I/O Puzzle is also worth a look … Continue reading Mindbending

In between tackling chunks of the pile of work in front of me, I’ve been poking and dragging my way through the levels of Untangle. It’s an insanely simple game – dots are connected with lines, and you drag the dots around until none of the lines cross. I am up to level 18 out of 20 and it is getting quite hard, but there is still something soothing about the combination of luck, logic, and trial-and-error that seems to work best for tackling the puzzles. Plus, it’s a pretty game, if you ignore or hide the chat window in … Continue reading Simple but addictive

An informal survey of two people suggests that this is more funny to women, but I am just dying with laughter over this dissection of a tampon ad, looking at the copy, typeface, and the fascinating background images. Make sure you read through the comments as well. For extra fun, try visiting the URL from the ad (www.upgrade-u.com) for even more surreal tampon fun.

There seems to be an online aesthetic of crude stick figures and line drawings, at least in my regular visits – typical would be the strip xkcd or the RPG Kingdom of Loathing. While the sketches here are significantly more artistic, the Myst-style game daymare town has a similar feel – minimalist sketches of a seemingly deserted world scattered with puzzles and items to collect [via not martha]. I haven’t played my way through the whole game (there doesn’t seem to be a save option and I unfortunately closed my browser window before finishing it) but I’m definitely going to … Continue reading Internet Line Art

Tomb Chess is pretty fun – it’s like chess, without all of the complicated rules, more randomness, and undead pieces. Basically, the board is a graveyard, and the pieces are “buried” until you decide to release one without knowing what type of piece it is – or even if it is your or your opponents’. There are no tricky moving rules – just left/right or up/down. With the simplicity and the randomness, you can’t think too much, so it moves a lot faster – it truly is the internet version of chess….

It’s been a bit slow recently on the contentful updates, but X-Entertainment is holding a summer megaparty, meaning that Matt is going to post at least something every day between now and August 1. Which means, if you aren’t an X-Entertainment reader, now’s a fine time to check it out. The weblog is fun, but the mainstay is the articles, reviewing pop culture cruft such as sodas, snacks, old TV ads and movies, and of course lots of toys – scroll through the list of articles on the front page to get a taste.

If you haven’t already seen it, check out this video that counts down from 100 using clips from 100 different movies. [via Ghost in the Machine] There’s not a lot to say except that it’s very clever. I didn’t think about it ahead of time, but as I was watching I was pleased that, where possible, famous scenes with numbers were used – of course 88 was the target speed of a time-traveling Delorean….

Sometimes, you just have to jump on a meme, and the Imagini VisualDNA at least looks pretty cool, and the process of choosing photos is sort of fun. Here’s mine: Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™